The induction of anger and its effects on self-criticism among depressed and non-depressed female college students.

This study was an investigation of the relationship between anger, self-criticism and depression. The research evaluated predictions derived from a psychoanalytic theory of depression, which views depression as a form of internalized anger, and other theories which postulate that self-criticism is a general cognitive style of depressives. Subjects were 41 female college students, who had been selected from a pool of 199 women who completed a modified version of the Zung Self-Report Depression Inventory. Depressed and nondepressed subjects were selected from the top and bottom 25 percent of the distribution respectively, and were asked to participate in the study, under the cover story that the research was on problem solving behavior. Subjects were assigned to one of two conditions, and were run individually with a confederate. Subjects in the experimental group were angered by the confederate during a version of the Prisoner's Dilemma Game, in which the confederate promised to cooperate but actually doublecrossed the subject. Control subjects worked on a different task, in which the confederate did cooperate fully with them. Thus, the study had a 2 x 2 design, with level of subject depression crossed with the two experimental conditions. All subjects were then evaluated for their degree of selfcriticism on three measures: negative and positive traits they marked as descriptive of them, and level of self-reward for their performance on a block design task. No difference between groups was found on the measure of positive