Theory of Mind, Excessive Reassurance-Seeking, and Stress Generation in Depression: A Social-Cognitive-Interpersonal Integration
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Introduction: According to the interpersonal model of depression, individuals with depression engage in excessive reassurance-seeking (ERS) about others’ beliefs regarding their self-worth, which can ultimately result in interpersonal rejection. We present the novel hypothesis that maladaptive ERS behaviors in depression may be driven by difficulties with “theory of mind”—the foundational ability to decode and reason about others’ mental states. Method: Participants included 31 young adults in a current episode of a unipolar depressive disorder, and 91 never-depressed adults. Theory of mind was assessed with standard, objective laboratory tasks. Stressful life events were assessed with a gold-standard contextual interview and independent rating system. Results: Consistent with hypotheses, in the depressed group only, lower accuracy of theory of mind decoding was associated with greater ERS, which was significantly associated with exposure to greater interpersonal, but not non-interpersonal, stress. Surprisingly, higher accuracy of theory of mind reasoning was associated with greater ERS. Discussion: The intriguing dissociation is discussed in terms of expanding the interpersonal model of depression to include the foundational social cognitive processes that underlie effective social communication.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it