Dysfunctional Attitudes and Their Effect on Depression

An experimental design attempted to examine changes in the dysfunctional attitudes in participants with and without depressive symptomatology following negative and positive mood induction and tested whether dysfunctional attitudes predicted symptoms of depression after one month. In the study took part one-hundred sixty undergraduate students in Kosovo. Results indicated that there was a slight decrease after negative mood priming in the level of dysfunctional attitudes for both groups of participants; however, after positive mood priming there was an increase for both groups. Nonetheless, hierarchical regression analysis results revealed that the model of prediction with the level of dysfunctional attitudes after both priming conditions and the group of depressive symptomatology explains a proportion of variance in depression 28.7% (ΔR2= .24, Fchange(3, 91) =10.655, p < .001). Findings suggest that negative mood priming is not a successful procedure in eliciting dysfunctional attitudes and that there is no difference based on depressive symptomatology in the increase of dysfunctional attitudes after mood priming. Further attention needs to be paid to the effects of positive mood priming. Nevertheless dysfunctional attitudes predict symptoms of depression, thus supporting Beck‘s model but the level of dysfunctional attitudes assessed after positive mood priming predicted symptoms of depression in a negative linear direction pointing to differences in findings and questioning the universality of the cognitive model of depression across cultures.