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Objectives. To test the hypothesis that the manic defence involves specific response styles to depression, namely distraction and indulging in dangerous activities.
Design. A correlational study was conducted with undergraduate participants assessed for hypomanic traits using Eckblad and Chapman's Hypomanic Personality Scale.
Method. Participants also completed the Beck Depression Inventory, and an expanded version of Nolen-Hoeksema's Response Styles Questionnaire.
Results. Depression was strongly associated with a ruminative response style. Hypomanic traits were associated with rumination, a distraction response style and with indulging in dangerous activities. However, as only 17% of the variance in hypomania scores was accounted for, other factors must play an important role in determining this trait.
Conclusions. Hypomania (and possibly mania) may be products of ineffective styles of coping with negative emotions.
Goodwin and Jamison (1990) describe hypomania as a mild form of mania characterized by elated mood, pressure of speech and thought, irritability, paranoia, increased sexuality and energy. The term `hypomanic personality' has been used to describe a type of personality in which hypomania is the predominant mood state (Eckblad & Chapman, 1986). There is a long-standing hypothesis, born of the early psychoanalytic literature, suggesting that manic states are defence mechanisms against depression (Abraham, 1911/1927; Dooley, 1921). A small number of studies have investigated this hypothesis in patients with bipolar disorder and in normal participants with hypomanic traits. Bentall and Thompson (1990) and French, Richards, and Scholfield (1996) found that hypomanic normal participants showed an abnormal Stroop effect for depressionrelated but not euphoria-related words. Winters and Neale (1985) studied explanatory style in remitted manic patients using an implicit attributional measure and found that, like depressed patients, they attributed negative events more than positive events to self. Lyon, Startup, and Bentall (1999) found that, on explicit measures of explanatory style, manic patients demonstrated the self-serving bias (external attributions for negative events and internal attributions for positive events), as did the normal controls. However, on Winters and Neale's implicit measure, they attributed negative events more than positive events to self. In the same study, manic patients showed an abnormal Stroop effect for depression-related words.
Despite this evidence for the manic defence, the mechanism underlying it is poorly understood. Nolen-Hoeksema's (1991) Response Styles Theory posits that individuals use a variety of strategies...