A collaborative study by U.S. and Asian researchers suggests that people who often boost their confidence by boasting about how great they are doing may end up in depression, according to a recent report by the U.S. news agency Hopewell International.
Researchers from the University of Pennsylvania and Nanyang Technological University in Singapore studied 295 college students in the United States and 2,780 high school students in Hong Kong. They had the students take a test and rate their own performance against other students. All participants filled out a depression scale at the same time. And then, the researchers had two groups of American students take a test that made the good performers think they were performing poorly, the poor performers think they were performing well, and the control group receive no suggestive feedback. As a result, the researchers found that those who gave themselves high scores were actually more severely depressed. The researchers concluded that when a person is under-competent, he or she tends to over-praise themselves, but with that may come depression.