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COPYRIGHT 2006 University of South Alabama
Depression is a serious disorder affecting 2 to 5 percent of the population (Kessler et al., 1994) and extracting a heavy toil on the health care system. Depressed individuals spend 1.5 times as much on health care as their nondepressed counterparts and 3 times as much on medication among those receiving pharmacotherapy (Simon, VonKorff, & Barlow, 1995). Because of the serious personal and societal effect of depression it is important to not only find effective but also cost effective treatments.
The most commonly used treatments for depression are psychotherapy and pharmacotherapy. However, these therapies are expensive and time consuming (Byrne & Byrne, 1993). Additionally, pharmacotherapy can have unpleasant side effects (Martinsen, 1990). One of the treatments for depression that is cost effective is exercise. The past 25 years has witnessed an increasing focus on the relationship between exercise and particularly on the therapeutic effect of exercise. Although this literature has been plagued with methodological problems, a meta-analysis has revealed that exercise results in an amelioration of depression with an overall effect size of-.72 (Craft & Landers, 1998).
Although exercise has been demonstrated to be beneficial in combating depression, exercise is seldom the primary focus of attention in the treatment of depression and few depressed patients begin or maintain an exercise program (Pollock, 2001). This is consistent with the data indicating that few people participate in a regular exercise program (Yeung, 1996). Although exercise is not the activity typically engaged in when depressed, or even when not depressed, Zuckerman (1989) found that men become more active than women in response to stress. This suggests that there is a gender difference in response to stress with males being more likely than females to become active. If males are more likely to become active following a stressful experience, it would seem to follow that they would also become more active than females following a depressive experience because stress is one of the factors contributing to the experience of depression. If males are more likely to exercise following a depressive experience this could partially explain the gender difference that exists in the incidence of depression.
The present study investigated the type of activity that people believe they would engage in following both a depressive event and a happy event.
Method
Participants
The participants were 98 introductory psychology students (34 men with a mean age of 21.44; SD = 3.36, and 64 women with a mean age of 20.56; SD = 2.74) who volunteered for the study as part of their course requirement. An additional 148 undergraduate students (98 women and 50 men) provided descriptions of happy and sad events.
Materials
A happy and depressive vignette were constructed from descriptions of events which 148 undergraduate students said made them happy or depressed and down in the dumps. Participants were asked to describe each event in as much detail as possible. From the descriptions provided, 6 happy and 4 depressive vignettes were selected based on a judgment, by the authors, that these represented...
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