Abstract

While clinical depression is not a unitary phenomenon, models of the disorder tend to evade the issue and provide monodimensional explanations of the symptoms and causes, and uniform approaches to the treatment of the various subtypes.

Psychophysiology, as a distinct approach to the study of depression, has provided evidence to support certain clinical distinctions between the subtypes and points to the necessity for a non-unitary model of depression and the development of a multidimensional classification system.

The Learned Helplessness model of depression, developed from observations in animal learning studies, has been another attempt to account for the phenomena of depression in terms of a simple learning relationship - a lack of correlation between response and outcome is cognitively represented by the subject which in turn perceives this as its own inability to control outcomes and this leads to 'learned helplessness' and depression.

Previously attempted psychophysiological comparisons between depression and LH have been rather inadequate in establishing a link between the two conditions. The present study is an investigation into the issues concerning the analogy between clinical depression and the LH state, particularly at the psychophysiological level.

For the purposes of the study, 30 subjects were randomly divided into three different groups: a naive group, a success group and a failure (helplessness) group. Electrodermal activity and heart rate were monitored in all three groups, during relaxation periods, before and after exposure to a neutral waiting period (Group 1), success in an electronic game (Group 2), and failure in the same game (Group 3).

Three-way analyses of variance with one repeated measure revealed a significant increase in Skin Conductance Level in Group 3 whereas Groups 1 and 2 showed no such changes. However, anagram performance, usually poor in 'helpless' subjects, did not differ between the groups.

The implications of these findings for the alleged analogy between clinical depression and the LH state are discussed.