"These findings suggest that in young adults, depressive symptoms are associated with difficulty in overriding prepotent responses to actively avoid aversive outcomes in the absence of reward."

My word... Could they have phrased that any less clearly?

As I understand it: the more depressive symptoms the subjects showed, the less likely they were to actively avoid bad outcomes (unless there was some other associated reward).

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floatrock 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

Yep, a sentence only someone on tenure-track could love.

ChatGPT, asked to translate to a high schooler: "Basically, this study found that young people with depression sometimes struggle to break automatic habits, especially when they’re trying to avoid something bad and there isn’t a prize or reward for doing it."

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JumpCrisscross 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

> ChatGPT, asked to translate to a high schooler: "Basically, this study found that young people with depression sometimes struggle to break automatic habits, especially when they’re trying to avoid something bad and there isn’t a prize or reward for doing it."

The translation is just as much of a word salad as the original, just with simpler vocabulary. Worse, it mangles the key point.

Prepotent responses aren't "automatic habits," but overriding responses (e.g. pain) [1]. The "sometimes" qualifier is unsubstantiated when describing "association". And the struggle isn't amplified ("especially") when avoiding something bad absent reward, the first part of the sentence is conditional upon the absence of a reward. (It's nonsense to say pool drownings are especially common in pools.)

[1] https://dictionary.apa.org/prepotent-response

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floatrock 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

And engineers don't really deal with frictionless spherical cows, but high schoolers might. All models are wrong, but some are useful.

	▲	JumpCrisscross 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		Non sequitur. This LLM’s summary is wrong and useless. It would be like talking about frictionless spheres and then applying the wrong equations.

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cheesecompiler 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

wow, you managed to make it more convoluted than the original.

	▲	JumpCrisscross 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		> you managed to make it more convoluted than the original Not relevant. I'm not trying to break down the original text, that was done adequately by the top comment. I'm showing why the LLM summary is nonsense.

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mmaia 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

When asked to provide real life examples from the paper conclusion:

Workplace Example

Scenario: An employee has a colleague who tends to send aggressive emails if they don’t receive updates on time.

Healthy Active Avoidance: The employee learns, “If I send a quick status update every morning, I avoid the stress of hostile emails.” They adopt this as a habit.

Depressive Active Avoidance Deficit: A person with depressive symptoms may take longer to make this connection or fail to act even after realizing it. They know sending updates might help, but initiating the behavior feels too effortful or pointless. As a result, they keep receiving stressful emails, reinforcing the feeling of helplessness.

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evanjrowley 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> sometimes struggle to break automatic habits

The article claimed it is a failure to learn whereas the phrasing from ChatGPT results in a much wider implication. Failure in a struggle to do something could imply a moral failure. If that's the message people get from this research, then there's a real risk it could worsen depression.

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wizzwizz4 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Please don't post ChatGPT slop without then going through it with a fine-toothed comb, and checking whether it's correct. (It almost never is, but the criticism can be interesting… in discussion about ChatGPT. Otherwise, it's a derail.)

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jancsika 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Your summary claims more than the original you quoted, no?

Example:

Case 1: Subject tries piano sight-reading exercises, if they get less than 80% accuracy a loud annoying horn will blare. Then subject goes again and try to improve the score.

Care 2. Subject tries piano sight-reading exercises, and if they get less than 80% accuracy they get notified that they didn't succeed at the test. Then they go again and try to improve their score.

The article strongly implies depression will make improvement more difficult in case 1 by the amount found in the study. But it doesn't necessarily imply that (or anything strongly) for case 2.

Your summary strongly implies that depression impedes progress in both cases at the same rate as the outcome of the study.

I'm not a domain expert but I'm going to guess "having bad outcomes" is as poor a paraphrase of "overriding prepotent responses" here as "having functions" would be to characterize functional programming languages.

	▲	Wurdan 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		I don't really know what the original is claiming, thanks to how it was written. I only offered a guess at what the authors were saying. So, you're saying that the study was narrower in scope and that the results are only applicable to specific bad/negative outcomes?