Depressive realism. Evidence for[edit] Evidence against[edit] When asked to rate both their performance and the performance of another, non-depressed individuals demonstrated positive bias when rating themselves but no bias when rating others.
Criticism of the evidence[edit] Some have argued that the evidence is not more conclusive because there is no standard for "reality," the diagnoses are dubious, and the results may not apply to the real world.[33] Because many studies rely on self-report of depressive symptoms, the diagnosis of depression in these studies may not be valid as self-reports are known to often be biased, necessitating the use of other objective measures. Due to most of these studies using designs that do not necessarily approximate real-world phenomena, the external validity of the depressive realism hypothesis is unclear.