中華心理衛生協會

Purpose: The aim of this research is to develop a depression Implicit Association Test (depression IAT) and to examine its validity. Methods & Results: In Study 1, the depression IAT developed in this research was performed on 33 depressed with BDI scores between 18 to 52 (32 men and 1 woman, aged 18-33) and 33 nondepressed participants with BDI scores between 0 to 11 (27 men and 6 woman, aged 20-28) in order to examine its discriminability. In addition, implicit and explicit depression tests and implicit and explicit self-esteem tests were carried out. The scores of the depression and self-esteem tests compared with the scores of the depression IAT to further verify the discriminability of the depression IAT. The results of t-test showed that the depression IAT discriminated between the depressed and nondepressed groups, but the self-esteem IAT did not. The explicit depression and the self-esteem tests also discriminated between the depressed and nondepressed groups. In Study 2, 84 sophomores and juniors from the university (62 men and 15 women, aged 18-22) were randomly assigned to positive or negative feedback groups to induce different emotions. Their performance on the implicit and explicit depression tests and the implicit and explicit self-esteem tests were analyzed to determine the validity of the depression IAT. The results showed that under induced negative emotion, only the depression IAT, was able to discriminate between the processing of positive and negative feedback. The self-esteem IAT did not discriminate. Conclusions: The depression IAT is effective tool for implicit depression indicator.