New Discovery: Depression Symptoms Most People Don’t Notice(Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf et al., 2016)

People with depression tend to think that when a bad event happens, itwas predictable.

According to the scientific paper referred to this time, the followingwere discovered as symptoms of depression.
This finding is very significant because we still have a lot ofunknowns about depression.

• When a bad event happens, people with depression think it was predictable.
  For example, after something bad happens, they tend to think, “I knewit was going to happen this way”.
  In this way, people with depression have a psychological tendency tobehave as if they are prophets about bad events.
• When a bad event happens, depressed people feel like “this could neverhave been avoided”.
  People with depression feel helpless over bad events.

These findings were revealed by a study of more than 100 peoplesuffering from mild to severe depression.
It is also found that the more severely depressed people were, themore likely they were to develop this condition.

People with depression show hindsight bias towards negative events

These symptoms can be described as a kind of hindsight bias.
Hindsight bias refers to the tendency to think that it was predictableafter something has happened.
Hindsight bias can happen to any person, in any situation, at any time.
Psychological experiments on hindsight bias have shown that when anevent's prediction is successful, subjects tend to remember that theprediction was stronger than it was before it occurred.
In other words, after we know the outcome, we tend to focus on thepast events that match it.

However, hindsight bias works differently for depressed people than itdoes for non-depressed people.
Usually, non-depressed people tend to have hindsight bias for positiveevents and not for negative events.
On the other hand, people with depression show the opposite tendency.

Specifically, it works as follows.
Those who are happy will leave behind memories that lead to positiveoutcomes for them.
At the same time, negative outcomes tend to be erased from memory.
On the other hand, people with depression leave behind memories thatlead to negative outcomes for them.
At the same time, positive outcomes have a tendency to be erased frommemory.
Furthermore, they feel helpless againt these situations, which leadsto a negative chain of increasingly worsening depressive symptoms.

Hindsight bias seems to act to encourage negative emotions in peoplewith depression, placing an additional burden on them.
An effective means of reducing the effects of hindsight bias is toconsider other events that could have happened.
If you want to deal with hindsight bias, I encourage you to try it.

Referenced Scientific Papers