Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Some researchers suggest that depression may be adaptive. For example, depression may provide an opportunity to assess our capabilities, learn from past failures, u-igger personal change, and allocate activity away from futile goals. There are a variety of signature phenomena associated with depression, such as stable, global, and internal styles of failure explanation, a cognitive loop of failure-related rumination, lowered self-esteem and self-efficacy, and increased negative generalization and depressive realism. DEPlanner is presented, a simulated agent that adapts to failure in a simulated environment and exhibits eight targeted signature phenomena of depression.