[Differences in the ratings of valence and concreteness for verbal concepts between depressive and nondepressive persons].

This study tries to reveal differences in the valency and concreteness ratings for nouns, verbs, and adverbs between depressive (N = 20) and nondepressive (N = 20) persons. For the valency ratings the results show significant differences between the two groups and between the syntactical categories as well as an interaction between the factors group and syntactical categories. For concreteness ratings we found a significant main effect for the group factor, a significant interaction between group and syntactical categories, and also a significant three way interaction between group, syntactical categories, and word valency. From these results it follows that, before conducting experiments in clinical psychology, one must establish the participants' representation of words that are used as stimuli. Otherwise, results could easily be misinterpreted as specific experimental results.