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Thirty depressed and 30 nondepressed college students completed a social judgment task. Students initially received either positive, negative, or no preliminary feedback and were told that they could obtain more extended feedback about their performance at a cost of $.20 for each unit of feedback. As predicted, depressed students were willing to relinquish a greater amount of money to obtain self-relevant feedback. Additionally, depressed and nondepressed Ss were more motivated to obtain additional feedback after they had received positive or no preliminary feedback than after they had received negative preliminary feedback. Results support Rehm's (1977) description of a heightened need for external reassurance among depressed persons.

Utilization of positive and negative feedback was investigated in a sample of 20 depressed and 20 nondepressed psychiatric inpatients. Patients, selected on the basis of Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory scores and clinical diagnoses, received primarily positive or negative feedback after completing a moral judgment task. Results suggest that depressed patients are likely to utilize positive, personally relevant information to enhance their low self-esteem, whereas nondepressed patients are more likely to counteract negative feedback that is inconsistent with their self-evaluations. The results fail to confirm the presence of memory deficits for positive feedback in depression, proposed by Kovacs and Beck (Am. J. Psychiatry, 135: 525-532, 1978), and are more consistent with the prediction of Mischel et al. (J. Consult. Clin. Psychiatry, 44: 92-103, 1976) that people tend to be cognitively biased toward success and toward perpetuating positive emotional states.