ABSTRACT
Depressed people often display reductions in self-efficacy. However this could arise from a number of processes: the depressive mood might be reducing self-efficacy, self-efficacy may be producing sadness, or the effects may be mediated by differences in performances. It may even be the case that something outside the model is producing the effects. Low expectations of depressed people are rendered even more plausible when they notice reductions in their performance. Poorer performance is often observed in depression. Some tasks involve a non-depressed presentation for optimal performance: For example smiling often enters an assessment of social performance, and a reduction of smiling by depressed people may partially explain their poorer social performance scores. The work on sadness and self-efficacy contributes to the theory and research on self-efficacy in two ways. First, it extends the role that emotion has on the formation of self-efficacy judgments. The second contribution is the extension of self-efficacy theory on the prediction and causation of depressive episodes.
