Depressive Realism

Depressive realism is the hypothesis, developed by the psychologists Lauren Alloy and Lyn Yvonne Abramson, that depressed individuals make more realistic inferences about the world than non-depressed individuals do. Depressed people are conventionally thought to hold a negative cognitive bias that produces recurrent negative automatic thoughts, maladaptive behaviors and dysfunctional beliefs about the world; depressive realism argues instead that this apparent negativity may actually reflect a more accurate appraisal of reality, and that it is non-depressed individuals whose own appraisals are positively biased rather than simply correct.