Depressive Styles and Social Acuity

Abstract

Social acuity has been identified as an important skill in promoting positive interpersonal and psychological functioning. Because research examining the accuracy of depressives' social perceptions has revealed inconsistent findings, the authors proposed that it may be helpful to consider the dimension of personality. Specifically, they examined whether dependency and self-criticism, 2 personality types that have been linked with depression, were related to social acuity. They hypothesized that whereas self-critical persons would show deficits in social acuity, dependent persons would be more skilled in this area. Ninety university students completed 2 measures of social acuity; the Interpersonal Perception Task and a task requiring subjects to estimate how they were perceived by peers on 10 trait dimensions. Results showed that self-critical persons were significantly less accurate on both tasks, even when controlling for depressive symptomatology. Dependency was unrelated to either measure of social acuity. Results support previous studies showing serious impairments in the interpersonal functioning of self-critical persons and point to distinct interpersonal correlates of dependency and self-criticism.