Assessment of Mood and Related Variables

A number of measures were given to research participants to assess their current mood, thereby allowing a categorization of depression to be made via a multi-measure approach. So as to determine whether depressive information processing biases may be viewed as trait-phenomena (rather than varying with depressive symptomatology) a number of measures were also given to assess past depression and degree of self-focus. Due to the length of the experiment, some research participants did not receive all measures. The following measures were used and were given in the order presented below.

• Beck Depression Inventory (BDI; Beck et al. 1961; Beck, 1967b). The BDI is a 21 item self-report inventory used to assess current depressive affect. The individual items are worded so that responses reflect increasing degrees of severity and are given the values of 0-3. The total possible score ranges from 0-63. This inventory is frequently used to assess depressive affect in college populations. It has acceptable validity and reliability (Beck, 1967b, Beck et al., 1988).

  
  

• The General Behavior Inventory (GBI; Depue et al., 1981) - The GBI is a 73 item self-report questionnaire that assesses behaviors associated with depression and mania. Individual items are worded so that responses reflect increasing frequencies of the behaviors in question. This scale was used to identify potentially recurrent or chronic-intermittent depressives who may not be depressed at the time of the experiment. The GBI has been subjected to numerous validation studies and is shown to be valid in assessing college student populations (Depue et al., 1989).

  
  

• Multiple Adjective Affect Checklist (MAACL; Zuckerman and Lubin, 1965) - The MAACL contains items indicative of both negative affect (e.g., blue, sad) and the absence of negative affect (e.g., happy, fine). Research participants are instructed to check all items which describe how they are feeling at the present time. The negative affect score consists of the sum of all negative items checked, and positive items not checked. This measure was used as a measure of current depressive affect, and as a way to examine how affect reported with respect to specific words (as is measured in the computer administered tasks) differs from other methods of self-reported negative affect. This measure is frequently employed to measure current mood in college populations. It's validity and reliability have been demonstrated (e.g., Zuckerman and Lubin, 1965).

  
  

• The Self Focus Sentence Completion Scale (SFSC; Exner, 1973) - The SFSC is a set of 31 sentence fragments. Research participants are instructed to complete each of the fragments. The measure is scored by counting how many sentence completions include various types of self-reference. The sum of self referent responses were used as an index of self-focus, which may be a component of depressive rumination on negative affect (Ingram, 1990). The SFSC has been validated on a large sample (Exner, 1973).

  
  

• The part of the Structured Clinical Interview for DSM-III-R Diagnosis (SCID; Spitzer et al., 1992) devoted to establishing a diagnosis of past depression was used to establish clinical criteria for having had a previous depressive episode. Additionally, some research participants received the SCID subsections regarding current depression, current mania, and past manic episodes, as a method of establishing the relevance of the other mood questionnaires for clinical depression in the current population.