Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Depression reduces capacity to learn to actively avoid aversive events

eneuro.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 67 posts

Re: Depression reduces capacity to learn to actively avoid aversive events

#21

Post by crmd »

OgsyedIE wrote: post #2

This is exactly what you'd expect if the hypothesis that depression is an evolved adaptation for surviving no-win scenarios that can only be waited out holds. In a scenario where a disaster has negatively affected the primary productivity of the local food web (e.g. volcano, forest fire, bolide, plague or tsunami), the groups of social species that exist in an environment are likely to engage in internal strife until…

This fits exactly with how depression feels to me, and appears to manifest itself in me behavior-wise, according to my partner. Def going to give this some thought. Thanks!

Re: Depression reduces capacity to learn to actively avoid aversive events

#22

Post by ansk »

My personal experience is that the cost of enduring a negative stimulus is not simply a function of the magnitude of the negative stimulus, but rather the magnitude of the negative stimulus in relation to the magnitude of all other concurrent negative stimuli. This study controls the environment so that a single negative stimulus is isolated and additional external negative stimuli are minimized, but it cannot control for the fact that a depressed person also endures a constant barrage of negative stimuli which are generated internally (hopelessness, exhaustion, fear, self-doubt, etc). The magnitude of these internally generated negative stimuli is likely much larger than that of the aversive external stimulus used in this study, so it seems reasonable that the marginal relief obtained by avoiding the external stimulus may be perceived as relatively negligible, or at least diminished to the point that the cost of avoiding is greater than the cost of enduring.

Re: Depression reduces capacity to learn to actively avoid aversive events

#23

Post by JumpCrisscross »

OgsyedIE wrote: post #2

This is exactly what you'd expect if the hypothesis that depression is an evolved adaptation for surviving no-win scenarios that can only be waited out holds. In a scenario where a disaster has negatively affected the primary productivity of the local food web (e.g. volcano, forest fire, bolide, plague or tsunami), the groups of social species that exist in an environment are likely to engage in internal strife until…

> the hypothesis that depression is an evolved adaptation for surviving no-win scenarios that can only be waited out holds

I remember from my days studying to be an actuary that the population that can best estimate mortality odds from the gut are actually the depressed. (Most of us tend to be way too optimistic about common risks and pessimistic about uncommon ones.)

This was also used to explain mammalian postpartum depression, when the mother has to make a wretching call as to whether to keep the offspring given its health, her health and the environmental context.

Re: Depression reduces capacity to learn to actively avoid aversive events

#24

Post by JumpCrisscross »

floatrock wrote: post #17
Wurdan wrote: post #3

"These findings suggest that in young adults, depressive symptoms are associated with difficulty in overriding prepotent responses to actively avoid aversive outcomes in the absence of reward." My word... Could they have phrased that any less clearly? As I understand it: the more depressive symptoms the subjects showed, the less likely they were to actively avoid bad outcomes (unless there was some other associated r…

Yep, a sentence only someone on tenure-track could love. ChatGPT, asked to translate to a high schooler: "Basically, this study found that young people with depression sometimes struggle to break automatic habits, especially when they’re trying to avoid something bad and there isn’t a prize or reward for doing it."

> ChatGPT, asked to translate to a high schooler: "Basically, this study found that young people with depression sometimes struggle to break automatic habits, especially when they’re trying to avoid something bad and there isn’t a prize or reward for doing it."

The translation is just as much of a word salad as the original, just with simpler vocabulary. Worse, it mangles the key point.

Prepotent responses aren't "automatic habits," but overriding responses (e.g. pain) [1]. The "sometimes" qualifier is unsubstantiated when describing "association". And the struggle isn't amplified ("especially") when avoiding something bad absent reward, the first part of the sentence is conditional upon the absence of a reward. (It's nonsense to say pool drownings are especially common in pools.)

[1] https://dictionary.apa.org/prepotent-response

Re: Depression reduces capacity to learn to actively avoid aversive events

#25

Post by bawolff »

munificent wrote: post #13
OgsyedIE wrote: post #2

This is exactly what you'd expect if the hypothesis that depression is an evolved adaptation for surviving no-win scenarios that can only be waited out holds. In a scenario where a disaster has negatively affected the primary productivity of the local food web (e.g. volcano, forest fire, bolide, plague or tsunami), the groups of social species that exist in an environment are likely to engage in internal strife until…

I do like evolutionary explanations for a lot of human behavior, but this one feels a little too pat to me. Patience, "biding our time", "hunkering down", etc. are actual emotional states we can experience and recognize, and depression doesn't feel even remotely like for most people as far as I'm aware. Also, this explanation would only really work if the entire group entered a dormant depressed state together. Other…

> On the contrary, when someone is depressed, the immediate response by people around them is generally try to "cheer them up" or encourage them to exit that depressed state.

True, but that is when times are generally good. I doubt people would be "cheer up" in an actual disaster situation.

From what i understand depressed people generally do well in disaster situations because they can still focus on critical tasks without getting overwhelmed by all the other bad stuff going on that isn't an immediate problem. (Possibly that's just a popular conception from movies. No idea if its true)

Re: Depression reduces capacity to learn to actively avoid aversive events

#27

Post by sfink »

munificent wrote: post #13
OgsyedIE wrote: post #2

This is exactly what you'd expect if the hypothesis that depression is an evolved adaptation for surviving no-win scenarios that can only be waited out holds. In a scenario where a disaster has negatively affected the primary productivity of the local food web (e.g. volcano, forest fire, bolide, plague or tsunami), the groups of social species that exist in an environment are likely to engage in internal strife until…

I do like evolutionary explanations for a lot of human behavior, but this one feels a little too pat to me. Patience, "biding our time", "hunkering down", etc. are actual emotional states we can experience and recognize, and depression doesn't feel even remotely like for most people as far as I'm aware. Also, this explanation would only really work if the entire group entered a dormant depressed state together. Other…

> I do like evolutionary explanations for a lot of human behavior, but this one feels a little too pat to me.

I agree.

> Patience, "biding our time", "hunkering down", etc. are actual emotional states we can experience and recognize, and depression doesn't feel even remotely like for most people as far as I'm aware.

But I don't think that's a valid counterargument. Depression doesn't need to feel like that or be motivated by that in order to be selected for. As long as it has the same effect as someone actively choosing to reduce consumption, the argument works. (Again, I'm still skeptical of the argument.)

> Also, this explanation would only really work if the entire group entered a dormant depressed state together.

That's valid, though to salvage the argument, you could say it applies to situations where active behavior turns out to be maladaptive. Perhaps fleeing the volcano causes you to inhale more gases and definitely die/fail to reproduce, whereas moping in place gives you a chance to luck out and be in the right place at the right times and thereby survive. That's a stretch, but the other examples are better: maybe the active people compete and kill each other off. Or the active people catch the plague while trying to help out.

Actively avoiding harm might even be the better approach 99% of the time, and yet the 1% where inaction is better means that the trait can survive. Say everyone has an innate x% chance of being active. Event 1: 60% of active people survive, 40% of inactive do. Repeat several times. Event N: the soldiers find and kill 100% of active people and 75% of inactive. The survivors will not have x=100.

Related example: dinosaurs and small mammals. Big things did really well until they didn't.

Re: Depression reduces capacity to learn to actively avoid aversive events

#28

Post by wizzwizz4 »

crmd wrote: post #21
OgsyedIE wrote: post #2

This is exactly what you'd expect if the hypothesis that depression is an evolved adaptation for surviving no-win scenarios that can only be waited out holds. In a scenario where a disaster has negatively affected the primary productivity of the local food web (e.g. volcano, forest fire, bolide, plague or tsunami), the groups of social species that exist in an environment are likely to engage in internal strife until…

This fits exactly with how depression feels to me, and appears to manifest itself in me behavior-wise, according to my partner. Def going to give this some thought. Thanks!

Elsewhere in the thread, people disagree. +1 to the reasons I suspect that what we call "depression" is actually several different things.

Re: Depression reduces capacity to learn to actively avoid aversive events

#29

Post by wizzwizz4 »

floatrock wrote: post #17
Wurdan wrote: post #3

"These findings suggest that in young adults, depressive symptoms are associated with difficulty in overriding prepotent responses to actively avoid aversive outcomes in the absence of reward." My word... Could they have phrased that any less clearly? As I understand it: the more depressive symptoms the subjects showed, the less likely they were to actively avoid bad outcomes (unless there was some other associated r…

Yep, a sentence only someone on tenure-track could love. ChatGPT, asked to translate to a high schooler: "Basically, this study found that young people with depression sometimes struggle to break automatic habits, especially when they’re trying to avoid something bad and there isn’t a prize or reward for doing it."

Please don't post ChatGPT slop without then going through it with a fine-toothed comb, and checking whether it's correct. (It almost never is, but the criticism can be interesting… in discussion about ChatGPT. Otherwise, it's a derail.)

Re: Depression reduces capacity to learn to actively avoid aversive events

#30

Post by sfink »

Given my own experience with depression, it makes some amount of intuitive sense. For me at least, "sadness" is not wrong, but other than that it doesn't describe the experience very well at all.

When I'm really down, I can't bring myself to care about "aversive events". I might even welcome them a little bit, both because they fit my understanding better (everything is proceeding as it should be, this ant eating my flesh makes sense) and because it's an opportunity to feel something at least. For me anyway, depression is more about absence of affect than feeling "sad", and ironically it is maddening (and yet, in a sense I can't bring myself to care.)

Then again, my explanation suggests that depressed people ought to be better at avoiding harm through inaction, and I didn't see that in the abstract?

Another hypothesis is that you could stop at "Depression Reduces Capacity to Learn". It feels like all mental processing is muted, and especially any forms of change. I guess you could do a study where you have to learn to actively prevent an aversive event for someone else. But the 1st hypothesis may still apply: depressed people may still care less about harm to someone else (than if they were not depressed). But at least you could separate out whether it's only because depressed people don't care what happens to themselves.

Post reply on HN