Examination of the relationships between metacognition and personality in patients with major depressive disorder and healthy individuals

Objective: In this study, it was aimed to compare the patients with Major Depressive Disorder and the control group without psychiatric treatment history in terms of metacognition and personality traits, and to determine the relationship between metacognition and personality traits and depression in the patient group. Materials and Methods: This study was conducted with 120 patients who admitted to Düzce University Faculty of Medicine Psychiatry Outpatient Clinic between August 2021 and April 2022 and were diagnosed with Major Depressive Disorder according to DSM-V diagnostic criteria and accepted to participate in the study and 72 healthy individuals who were similar to the patient group in terms of various demographic characteristics and did not have a history of psychiatric diagnosis and treatment. Socio-Demographic Data Form, Temperament and Character Inventory (TCI), Metacognition Scale-30 (MCQ-30) and Beck Depression Scale (BDI) were given to the participants for data collection purposes. Results: According to the results, it was observed that the patient group had higher harm avoidance, self-transcendence and lower self-directedness, cooperativeness and persistence scores than the control group. In addition, it was observed that people in the patient group had more maladaptive metacognitive beliefs than those in the control group. There are correlations between personality and metacognitive beliefs in both the patient and control groups. According to mediation analyzes, it was shown that the relationship between harm avoidance and depression in the patient group was mediated by cognitive confidence and the need to control thoughts. The same results were obtained for the relationship between cooperativeness and depression. It has been shown that the relationship between self-directedness and depression is mediated by the need to control negative beliefs and thoughts about uncontrollability and danger. Conclusion: Our current study is the first to examine the relationships between temperament and character, metacognitive beliefs and depressive disorder in a clinical population. We confirmed the putative mediating effect of metacognitive beliefs on the relationship between personality dimensions and depression. Our results show that there is an important metacognitive pathway from personality to affective disorders.Keywords: Depression, metacognition, temperament, character, personality