Self-Schema Decision Consistency in Clinical Depressives

Abstract

To investigate the consistency of self-schema processing, female clinical depressives and nondepressed controls made a series of self-referent personality judgments concerning depressed-content and nondepressed-content personal adjectives. Support for the consistency of self-schema processing was provided by a measure of the number of decision consistencies between dichotomous yes-no self-ratings and subsequent 9-point self-reference ratings. In accord with predictions generated from a content-specific self-schema model, greater decision consistency was found for self-schema-congruent content, relative to content that was schema-incongruent, for both clinical depressives and control subjects.