Depression, unlike Normal Sadness, is Associated with a “Flatter” Self-Perception and a “Flatter” Phenomenal World

Abstract

Three variables—manifest anxiety, psychological resilience, and phenomenal flatness—were tested for their ability to qualitatively differentiate depression from normal sadness. Toward this end, 221 college students completed the Center for Epidemiological Studies' Depression Scale, our newly developed Multidimensional Sadness Inventory, the Short Form of the Manifest Anxiety Scale, the Connor-Davidson Resilience Scale, the Scale of Social Desirability, our newly developed Test for Flat versus Deep Object-Perception, our newly developed Survey of Flat versus Deep Person-Perception, and our newly developed Survey of Flat versus Deep Self-Perception. On each trial in the Test for Flat versus Deep Object-Perception, the students observed two ambiguous figures—a circle/sphere with a radius of 1 unit and a square/cube with sides 1.675 units long—and they selected the bigger object—either the “phenomenally flat” circle with an area 12% larger than the area of the square, or the “spatially deep” cube with a volume 12% larger than the volume of the sphere. On the Survey of Flat versus Deep Person-Perception, the students indicated how they perceive other students on 43 rating scales anchored by one adjective synonymous with flat and by another adjective synonymous with deep, and on the Survey of Flat versus Deep Self-Perception, they rated how they perceive themselves on the same 43 scales. Our results indicate that lower resilience and higher anxiety are associated not only with greater depression, but also with greater sadness controlling for depression. Greater phenomenal flatness on the other hand, as gauged by our measures of flat versus deep object-perception, person-perception, and self-perception, is associated with greater depression but not with greater sadness controlling for depression.