Depression and Sequential Decision-Making Revisited

Background: The effect of depression on decision-making is an important but still an unsettled issue. Although most studies have reported that clinically depressed participants show worse performance, there are also studies that have shown no or even positive effects. Specifically, von Helversen et al. (2011) were able to document a positive effect of depression on task performance in a sequential decision-making task called the secretary problem (SP). Here, we (1) aimed to replicate this study in an extended version using more trials and (2) modified it by including an additional condition in which negative feedback was given. Method: Eighty-two participants took part. They were split into…