Self-derogations and interpersonal theory

The interpersonal theory of personality has been applied to explain depressed people's dilemma: The depressed person's submissive behavior invites dominating reactions from other people, and those reactions ustain the depressed person's depression. Experiments I and 2 showed that self-derogations connote submissiveness but are generally judged to be neutral in affiliation. Experi-ment 3 tested implications for the behavior of dysphoric and nondysphoric Ss as they interacted with a self-derogating, other-derogating, or nonderogating confederate partner. Ss selected a topic from a list and talked about it for 1 rain; the confederates script was fixed. The S's judgments ofthe confederate, choice of topics, satisfaction with the interaction, and actual responses were analyzed. Self-derogators were judged to be submissive, licited dominating reactions, and selected more topics with negative content. The interpersonal theory of personality (Horowitz & Vitkus, 1986; Kiesler, 1983; Orford, 1986; Wiggins, 1982)organizes in-terpersonal behaviors along two dimensions--a dimension of affiliation that ranges from hostile (cold) to friendly (warm) be-havior and a dimension of power or status that ranges from submissive to dominating behavior. Scolding, for example, lies in the quadrant that reflects hostile dominance, and helping lies in the quadrant that reflects friendly dominance. This se-mantic structure has been confirmed in a number of factor analytic studies that showed that two dimensions account for a large proportion of the variance in ratings of personality trait