Depressed people are just more realistic, right? Not so, says Berkeley study

Are depressed people simply more realistic in judging how much they control their lives, while others view the world through rose-colored lenses, living under the illusion that they have more control than they do?. That's the general idea behind -depressive realism,- a theory that has held sway in science and popular culture for more than four decades. The problem is, it-s just not true, new research finds. -It's an idea that exerts enough appeal that lots of people seem to believe it, but the evidence just isn-t there to sustain it,- says Professor Don Moore , the Lorraine Tyson Mitchell Chair in Leadership and Communication at UC Berkeley's Haas School of Business and co-author of the study , in press at the journal Collabra:Psychology . -The good news is you don't have to be depressed to understand how much control you have. Depressive realism - The concept of depressive realism stems from a 1979 study of college students examining whether they could predict how much control they had over whether a light turned green when they pushed a button. The original research concluded that the depressed students were better at identifying when they had no control over the lights, while those who weren-t depressed tended to overestimate their level of control. Moore and his colleagues set out to try to replicate those findings as part of a broader effort to restore trust in scientific research, much of which is woven into the fabric of the scientific community and wider culture. Researchers are revisiting bedrock studies to shore up the most basic of scientific principles: Can the research-and its conclusions-be replicated?