Your predominant attitude is how you experience life. Published in Journal of Psychopathology and Clinical Science, researchers find that even after being treated for depression, patients cont to focus on negative thoughts and interpretation of life.

The study was a meta-analysis of 44 studies, totaling 2,081 subjects with a history of major depression and 2,285 subjects acting as healthy controls. The 44 studies examined participants’ response time to negative, positive, or neutral stimuli.

One finding was that the healthy control subjects responded more quickly to emotional and non-emotional stimuli than those with a history of depression, without regard to whether those stimuli were positive, negative, or neutral. However, participants with history of major depression spent more time processing negative emotional stimuli over positive stimuli.

The findings of the study shows that people with history of recurring major depression are less able to control the information they process than healthy individuals, and they also hold a greater bias on attention towards negative stimuli.

While one should be realistic and not color their world with rose colored glasses, people with major depression are depressed because they view the world in a negative way, either by spinning positive phenomena into negative ones or increasing their focus on negative stimuli. As a result, they color their world with negativity and end up in a psychological loop of negativity and depression.

Victor Frankl once said in his book, Man’s Search for Meaning, “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.” It’s not just the situation, it’s our attitude towards our situation is what determines our resilience to it.

A Wen et al. Biased cognitive control of emotional information in remitted depression: a meta-analytic review. Journal of Psychopathology and Clinical Science. 2023. HTTPS://doi.org/10.1037/abn0000848