Depressed Not More Accurate

People seem to love the idea that depressed folk are more realistic.  Not so, says an ’06 paper I’ll mention again later this week:

A debate in the depressive realism literature ended in the conclusion that neither depressed nor nondepressed subjects displayed differential accuracy in terms of being able to vary their judgments to achieve accuracy across changing situations (Dykman et al., 1989, p. 442). Instead, who appeared more accurate was an accident of the match between a dispositional bias (chronic perceptions of low or high control) and the degree of control actually available in a given task.