The nature of the depressive experience in analogue and clinically depressed samples

The use of university students as analogue subjects in depression research remains a controversial one, because it is not clear if the depressive experience of analogue and clinical samples differs qualitatively or quantitatively. Accordingly, this study directly compared 101 adult outpatients with major depressive disorder to 175 analogue depressed university students on self-report severity ratings of DSM-IV symptoms of major depressive episode. Several goodness-of-fit indices revealed that the covariance matrices of the depression symptoms were very similar in the two samples. These and other results from the study supported a phenomenological continuity hypothesis. Further, although the two samples differed quantitatively, the nature of the depressive experience did not appear to be one of transient and mild distress for many individuals in the analogue sample.