E-ISSN : 2733-4538
This study investigated premises that tendency of people to be optimistic about future in general and that of depressives to be pessimistic. Two hundred college students participated in this study. Participants were presented with a questionaire containing eight positive and eleven negative future events. The subjects were asked to estimate their own chance of experiencing positive and negative future events compare to average others on the 10-point scale. Overall, they rated their own chance to be above average for the positive events and below average for the negative events. To examine the hypotheses that depressives make negative predictions about the future, the depressed and nondepressed subjects were selected based on the scores of BDI and the two groups were compared. As hypothesized, depressives estimated greater perceived probability of the negative future events and less probability of the positive events than did nondepressives. Several theoretical explanations for the results and the limitations were discussed.