Accentuating the Positive Is Hard for Depressed or Socially Anxious Patients

The two disorders are associated with different facets of the extraversion trait, consistent with their fundamental differences.

Some people have questioned the distinctiveness of anxiety and depressive disorders: They frequently co-occur, pharmacotherapy can be similar, and patients with either disorder have a stable, heritable tendency to experience negative emotions. Recent work has suggested that low positive emotion, a distinguishing feature of depression, might also appear in people with social anxiety disorder.

To learn more, researchers administered questionnaires to 350 college students (76% female; mean age, 19) and 204 psychiatric outpatients (69% female; mean age, 44) on social anxiety and depressive symptoms and on the extroversion/positive emotion (E/PE) trait. The researchers empirically derived four E/PE facets: sociability (warmth, gregariousness, enj…

Reviewing Author

M. Katherine Shear, MD

Accentuating the Positive Is Hard for Depressed or Socially Anxious Patients

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Reviewing Author