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

41–50 of 67 posts

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

#41

Post by cheesecompiler »

sfink wrote: post #30

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…

The authors take a leap in assuming there's a difficulty with overriding a response. But in my and others' experience from group therapy, I can confidently say it's more like either apathy or being numbed out, to the point of either not noticing or caring that the aversive sound is happening.

This is how SSRI has felt for me also, incidentally: an even deeper apathy, setting in from lack of any emotion at all.

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

#42

Post by cindyllm »

cheesecompiler wrote: post #41
sfink wrote: post #30

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…

The authors take a leap in assuming there's a difficulty with overriding a response. But in my and others' experience from group therapy, I can confidently say it's more like either apathy or being numbed out, to the point of either not noticing or caring that the aversive sound is happening. This is how SSRI has felt for me also, incidentally: an even deeper apathy, setting in from lack of any emotion at all.

[dead]

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

#43

Post by cheesecompiler »

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…

depression, like alcoholism, is a crutch and a symptom of a deeper issue, not an independent behaviour in a vacuum.

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

#44

Post by cheesecompiler »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #24
floatrock wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 "au…

wow, you managed to make it more convoluted than the original.

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

#45

Post by mmaia »

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."

When asked to provide real life examples from the paper conclusion:

Workplace Example

Scenario: An employee has a colleague who tends to send aggressive emails if they don’t receive updates on time.

Healthy Active Avoidance: The employee learns, “If I send a quick status update every morning, I avoid the stress of hostile emails.” They adopt this as a habit.

Depressive Active Avoidance Deficit: A person with depressive symptoms may take longer to make this connection or fail to act even after realizing it. They know sending updates might help, but initiating the behavior feels too effortful or pointless. As a result, they keep receiving stressful emails, reinforcing the feeling of helplessness.

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

#46

Post by andoando »

Filligree wrote: post #8
mothballed wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've often wondered if depression is exactly that, a system level optimization. Sometimes depression just happens, but sometimes it is triggered by low social status, realizing you've hurt someone in an unjustified or accidental way, having other mental illness, being seriously injured, or some other way that threatens the fitness of the overall group. Depression might be a (albeit flawed) system level way of reducin…

You’re proposing group selection, which always never happens. Evolution functions not at the level of groups, or even individuals, but genes inside of individuals. Most of the time thinking of it as group selection at the genetic level (=individuals) does work, fortunately.

It makes technical sense that if one individual helped for example to make the rest of the colony propgate 3x faster, it would be a collective reproductive advantage

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

#48

Post by leoh »

sfink wrote: post #30

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…

Well said and thank you for sharing

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

#49

Post by JumpCrisscross »

cheesecompiler wrote: post #44
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 "au…

wow, you managed to make it more convoluted than the original.

> you managed to make it more convoluted than the original

Not relevant. I'm not trying to break down the original text, that was done adequately by the top comment. I'm showing why the LLM summary is nonsense.

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

#50

Post by getnormality »

The article title is "Depression Levels Are Associated with Reduced Capacity to Learn to Actively Avoid Aversive Events in Young Adults". Are we sure we want to turn that into "Depression reduces capacity to learn to actively avoid aversive events"? I don't think there's good cause to go from correlation to this particular arrow of causation here. Reverse causation or a common third factor are also plausible.
Post reply on HN