You’ve probably heard about the power of mindset when it comes to education. As the developmental psychologist Carol Dweck famously showed, students with a growth mindset tend to do better in school than students with a fixed mindset because they're less likely to give up in the face of setbacks. What you might not know is that new research is showing mindset can have a powerful effect on dealing with negative emotions, or moods.
Suppose you wake up after a poor night of sleep, groggy and irritable. Do you see your mood as malleable, something you can change with a little effort? Or do you see it as fixed, something beyond your control?
Psychologists call these “emotion malleability beliefs.” It turns out that people who believe their emotions are malleable tend to have a greater sense of well-being, fewer symptoms of depression, and more confidence in their ability to manage their emotions.
The reason is that people who think their emotions are malleable tend to use superior cognitive strategies to deal with their moods. One such strategy is “cognitive reappraisal,” the ability to take a different perspective on your mood.
If you wake up groggy and annoyed, you might think, “Well, one bad night of sleep probably won’t destroy my day." In contrast, people with more fixed beliefs tend to use inferior strategies, such as rumination, where you obsess over how bad life is. “Why does this keep happening to me?” is the refrain of those with fixed mindsets about emotions.
Can Mindset Impact Depression?
I talked with Elizabeth Kneeland, psychology professor at Amherst College and a leader in the field of emotion malleability and depression, to find out more. As she put it, “if you think your emotions are outside your control, will you cope with them differently? Are you at risk for something like depression?”
In the 1990s, the dominant message about depression was that it’s a chemical imbalance in the brain, likely involving the neurotransmitter serotonin. That view went hand-in-hand with the idea that depression is largely outside of our personal control.
Despite the lack of consistent evidence that depressed people have lower serotonin than people who aren’t depressed, the idea quickly became widely accepted among the public.
About ten years ago, Dr. Kneeland began to wonder whether the chemical imbalance view could actually make depression worse. Perhaps it gives patients the mindset that depression is beyond their control—and thus robs them of the cognitive strategies that might turn it around.
Putting the Mindset-Depression Connection to the Test
Evidence already indicated that there was a correlation between more fixed emotion beliefs and depression. But Kneeland wondered: Does depression make people’s beliefs about their emotions more fixed? Or are people who have fixed beliefs about their emotions more likely to get depressed—or stay depressed?
In one study (Kneeland and Dovidio 2020), she tracked a group of people at high risk for depression: first-year college students. Those who started the semester with more malleable views of emotion had fewer symptoms of depression near the end of it than those who started out with more fixed views.
In another study (Kneeland and Simpson 2022), she worked directly with people who have some experience of depression. Half of the group read a short article about how emotions are malleable; the other half read an article on an unrelated subject. Then everybody wrote a short essay about something bad that happened to them.
Those who received the message that emotions are malleable coped better. They used significantly more cognitive reappraisal, and their bad mood lifted more quickly. “They still get upset,” Kneeland told me, “but they come out of it faster when they’ve gotten the message that emotions can change, that your emotions are under your control.”
Depression Essential Reads
Kneeland thinks more fixed beliefs keep people stuck. Depression is, in part, a matter of getting stuck in low moods. It seems plausible that changing your beliefs about emotion might help with depression itself.
New Findings Highlight the Problem with the Chemical Imbalance Story
When we tell people that their depression stems from a chemical imbalance, are we inadvertently giving them the wrong mindset? Kneeland teamed up with Hans Schroder, a psychologist in the psychiatry department at the University of Michigan, to find out.
In a study published this year in Cognition and Emotion, they recruited nearly 300 people and split them into two groups. Both groups read about a hypothetical patient, Alex, whose depression was caused by an “overactive amygdala,” and both groups were shown a brain scan.
The only difference was the framing. The first group was told that Alex’s amygdala “is not doing its job,” and that something is wrong with her brain. The second group was told that her amygdala “is doing its job,” by signaling that something in Alex’s life is wrong. Her depression, in other words, is a helpful signal.
The first group thought Alex’s depression would last longer, that she had less control over it, and that she would need long-term treatment. The second group thought that she had a better chance of recovering, that she had more personal control over her depression, and that she probably wouldn’t need long-term treatment.
Mindset is not a cure-all, of course. Kneeland emphasized that there may be some conditions in which more malleable beliefs about emotions might actually leave you worse off—perhaps those with a stronger biological basis, such as bipolar disorder or schizophrenia.
The belief that emotions can change might also tip into “I should be able to change my emotions, and I’m failing to,” which could feed depression or anxiety. “A lot of that is an open empirical question about context,” she said.
The Practical Lesson: Seeing Depression as a Signal
The work of Kneeland, Schroder, and others leads me to think that seeing depression as a functional signal, not a malfunction, can help alleviate it in more ways than one.
Not only does it lead us to try to find the source of our depression—what depression is trying to tell us about our lives. It also shifts our beliefs about emotions toward the malleable end of the scale, and thus leads us to adopt exactly the kinds of cognitive strategies that are most helpful for working through it.
A version of this post appears on my Substack.