Depressive Realism

Just another confirmation that depressed people sees the world more clearly than the rest of us.

Depressed people are normally thought of as being somewhat disengaged from the rest of the world, but psychologists at Queen’s University in Canada have found that mildly depressed students actually have a heightened ability to detect other people’s emotions.

Kate Harkness and colleagues asked 43 depressed and non-depressed students to identify people's emotions from pictures that showed only the eye region of their faces. The 16 students who were classified as mildly to moderately depressed – based on their score on the Beck Depression Inventory – performed significantly better (78 per cent correct) on this emotion-recognition test relative to the 27 non-depressed controls (69 per cent correct).