Positive Fantasies About the Future Predict Symptoms of Depression | Hacker News Reader

Positive Fantasies About the Future Predict Symptoms of Depression

pss.sagepub.com

71 pointsbemmu42 comments

I've only read the abstract, but here is my guess. There is a phenomenon where some people vividly fantasize about the "great results" of some yet-to-be-taken action or set of actions. The fantasizing itself brings them satisfaction. This satisfaction, then, in a sense undermines the sense of dissatisfaction that is necessary to motivation. Thus, the person never puts his plans into action. I would think that the resulting failure to achieve then triggers depression.

In plainer terms, for some people daydreaming is its own reward, but it's a short-term reward that undermines the effort needed to achieve reward in the long-term. When the dream fades and you're still where you are, that's depressing.

I was thinking that having positive fantasies about the future could be an escape mechanism from present unpleasant feelings.

It could also be high expectations:

Woman: I'm going to marry a rich guy that I love and have three children and live happily ever after

Man: I'm going to change the world with my non-profit start-up and be a rockstar programmer. Later, I'll sell it for billions and spend time with family.

Reality: Man and woman have a relationship that ends after 5 years, no children, and both have a standard peon job in a big company without any influence or reponsibility.

Richard Yates' Revolutionary Road is an excellent exploration of a couple with aspirations that don't match reality and/or their willingness to work to achieve what they want. Great narrative voice that manages to be detached and matter-of-fact while being heart-wrenching sympathetic. Must be read to be believed, very impressive.

High expectations for a woman is to get married? Not sure you realized what you wrote

I think it's more about the high level of happiness, not the specific situation.

Person Creates model, the go to is marriage for a woman. I'm sure he meant nothing bad, still unfortunate.

Don't read it as "a" woman, but as "the" woman (in this three line story). Not every man has the same goals/motivation as the man in the story either. I know I'm not money-motivated.

Well, statistically, and historically, that has been the case.

Whether it shouldn't be or not, is another matter, but men don't buy Wedding magazines or care to watch rom-coms ending with marriages as much.

I agree here, expectations drive a huge amount of emotion. Take two people who receive a 5k bonus, if one expected twice as much they will be pissed off and ungrateful. If one expected nothing, they would probably be very happy.

This is why it is so important for companies and hiring managers to set appropriate expectations for their employees. Please do not tell people that they can expect career growth, regular challenges, and tons of opportunity if that is not the case.

People will absolutely take decent jobs with no opportunities or career growth, but you have to be honest about that. If you lie and the employee realizes it a year later, they will probably start underperforming and/or looking to leave. Appropriate expectations are paramount!

This is actually very in line with what they are hypothesizing. Apparently a problem with positive fantasies is that they present an easy path to an idealized future situation. The path is missing any obstacles and possible hardships. And this somehow leads to an insufficient energy mobilization for pursuing that path. [makes sense from an planning/resource allocation perspective] As a "result" you don't put enough effort into tackling the encountering problems, once you reenter reality. The depressing effect comes later, when you face your low-achievement.

I read many years ago that one of the keys to long term happiness is supposed to be having "achievable goals". By using the word "fantasy" I would assume the article/abstract means unachievable or unrealistic goals, in which case I can imagine that these would be more likely to lead to unhappiness in the long term.

I would think that the resulting failure to achieve then triggers depression.

~1500 years ago: desire is the root cause of suffering.

That's a very good summary of the issue. Thanks !

Wow! This seems related to [self-discrepancy theory](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-discrepancy_theory), which posits that the gap between the "ideal self" and the "actual self" creates inner conflict.

If I might extrapolate with anecdotes, I know some people who are prone to extensive storytelling about every event. This leads them tremendously astray at times, because to make a better, more truthful story they weave in their hopes, fears, and biases. A short news item becomes another data point in making the myth of conspiracy, invasion, or the inherent failures of the other. And self-encouragement to act on a task tends to take the form of saying out loud, "it'll be better when it's done."

But in both cases, talking it up does nobody any good. It's the mind being directed towards rationalizations about the future as a destination, a place to arrive at with a tidy fairy tale ending, and life doesn't really have those. What life has a lot of is journeys conducted by routine, accented with pivotal chance events. Whatever happens, you wake up the next day and continue. And that is depressing if you're convinced that an ending should take place!

Behind a subscription model for the journal, so unable to read the article but:

I would love to read what the definition of positive fantasies in this case would be.

I'm probably mostly curious because I've always been a day-dreamer and curious what the difference from mind wandering to positive self fantasies might be.

My intuition is the difference between, say, imagining random stories or events, versus imagining a future self accomplishing some thing you actually want to accomplish. But I'm also unable to read it, so this is just speculation.

Mind wandering - Walter Mitty style fantasies of being a submarine commander in WWII.

Positive fantasies - Finishing this graduate degree and becoming an esteemed, recognized member of your field.

Indulging yourself eating junk food believing that you will lose weight and become fit in the near future anyway.

Day dreaming and generally being oblivious .. is probably strongly correlated with this kind of thinking. At least anecdotally I know it in myself.

Day dreaming is the opposite of "conscientiousness".

It's not defined very clearly in the article, but they seem to use the definition from an earlier article:

>"Positive fantasies about the future are positively experienced mental images of future desired events that emerge in the stream of thought ... They depict an idealized version of the future that may include the attainment of desired future outcomes, as well as smooth, idealized processes of working toward these outcomes." Kappes, H. B., & Oettingen, G. (2011). Positive fantasies about idealized futures sap energy

Do they define idealized? It seems the key aspect was just pushed off into another word.

How big is the effect?

Really big actually:

>As expected, the more positively participants fantasized, the fewer symptoms of depression they showed at Time 1, r = −.29, p < .02, but the more symptoms they showed a month later, r = .45, p < .001 (see Table 2). The same patterns emerged when we analyzed the positive- and negative-fantasies scores separately (at Time 1: ps < .07; change between Times 1 and 2: ps ≤ .002).

I am reminded of how the stoics believed that imagining the worst outcome made you a happier individual.

http://www.philosophizethis.org/10-things-the-stoics-can-tea...

Anyone have a link to the full text that's outside of paywall?

In the case where depression is caused by life events, I think a better solution is to make changes to fix the problems in your life rather than just engage in wishful thinking.

Oh yea, my friend should have just fixed that incident where he found his sisters body instead of being depressed about it.

Why do people have to post dickish comments like this when there is any discussion of depression? It should have been obvious from my comment that I was referring to life events such as stressful jobs, bad relationships, etc. and not traumatic events over which you have no control.

I understood and agree with what you intended to say, but perhaps "life events" may have been a bit ambiguous, and some people tend to define "depression caused by life events" as depression caused by tragedies.

Because people insist on posting dickish comments like "maybe they should just fix their problems" and then retreat into whiny complaints that they obviously didn't mean this for anyone who it didn't apply to, they just felt it was useful to poison the discussion by making uselessly broad comments.

This is another manifestation of delusional disorder.

What findings! Now go study why proving the obvious gives meaning to one's life.

"Positive thinking", in various forms, is standard practice for therapy with depression and anxiety (both generally highly correlated with negative thoughts and fantasies; very pessimistic, worst case sort of thinking). The near-term benefits of it are incredibly useful, it can get people out of their current, negative, mental situations. But identifying long-term problems with it is important. It may seem obvious to some, but if there's not a strong link between the two measured over a population, you can't know how bad it may or may not be. It could be that a large percentage ends up slipping back into depression after the original therapy efforts in which case, yeah, the method has problems or needs better follow-up. Or it could be that some (small) percentage gets trapped in the fantasies and fails to actualize them. It's still important to find methods to help them, but the scale of the problem has to be measured to understand what's happening and why.

I wonder if there is a similarity in this case: Being in a state of hunger makes one feel hungry and long for food, perhaps even dream of it while sleeping. A temporary therapy would be to have the person imagine they are full, pressing in their stomach. Would that work temporarily? Maybe. But the underlying problem is still there. I don't know.

A hundred years ago it was "obvious" that blacks were inherently less intelligent and more closely related to monkeys. Armchair scientists, who make claims but don't study them, are bad influences on the rest of the world.

There are analogies but that one clearly went off course. Sarcasm sure invites responses. Here's an analogy about the actual content: Athletic tape while initially effective has been shown among a large population to eventually lead to arthritic states. That would make sense except that persons using athletic tape on their knees for example, already need it because they are tending to have soreness and stiffness (leading toward an arthritic condition already). Doesn't that sound familiar?

Because a lot of obvious stuff ends up being wrong, so you have to test all of it to find the true obvious from the fake obvious.

I was being sarcastic. The study is very flawed at its core very much like saying blowing your nose may be temporarily effective but has been shown to eventually lead to sinus infections as our statistical models show in our mind-numbing study. The participants in said activity are already susceptible to a negative outcome.

Please don't post snarky dismissals to HN, especially of new work. Substantive criticism is fine, of course, but snarky dismissals lower the quality of the discussion.

Here's a hypothesis: People that use positive reenforcement tend to need positive reenforcement to right themselves and are obviously more susceptible toward tipping over toward depression than individuals who are simply too balanced and happy to even consider it as part of their daily routine. The study is not obvious but rather obviously incorrect with a tainted initial state of subjects leaning toward long term depression. Therapy is a symptom of discontent. This is a case of intellectuals being outsmarted by their own process.

I can't even joke on this forum. Marvin Minsky and Ray Kurzweil thought of humor as a higher form of intelligence so what gives?

There was nothing "obvious" about it.

If anything the "common obvious wisdom" was the exact opposite: that you should "think positive".

Besides, proving the obvious is part of science. It's not enough to see that something holds, you also need to prove it.

You'd be surprised how hard proofs for "the obvious" in math can be, and even more surprise at how useful they can turn out to be.

This is a typical meta response defending the scientific framework rather than looking at the actual content. Sarcasm sometimes jars attention which was my intent. The study is doing more harm than good by reversing an effective therapy simply because it is assuming a negative correlation when the symptom (therapy) itself is indicative of the initial state of the individual tending to the more negative outcome which taints the study entirely.

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