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Depressed and nondepressed male and female college students were given spurious feedback, either positive or negative, about the results of personality tests. They then watched a film of an intensive encounter group. Psychophysiological reactions to both feedback and observation of sad film models were recorded. Depressed subjects showed greater arousal than nondepressed subjects only after negative feedback. Depressed subjects reacted emotionally to the sad models after negative feedback; nondepressed subjects, after positive feedback. The arousal results were viewed as indicating that depressed subjects were particularly reactive to a "loss" of self-esteem.Low self-esteem has often been regarded as a distinctive quality of depression (Beck, 1967;Mendels, 1970), and yet previous research has not unequivocally demonstrated that depressed persons are any more affected by events that presumably diminish self-esteem than are nondepressed persons (Coleman, 1975;Flippo & Lewinsohn, 1971). The present study, unlike previous investigations, both directly manipulates self-esteem and employs a psychophysiological measure of consequent response to determine whether depressed college students were, in fact, unusually vulnerable to a "loss" of self-esteem. Toward that end, mildly depressed and nondepressed subjects were given spurious feedback, which was either positive or negative in nature, about the "results" of their personality tests (cf. Jacobs, Berscheid, & Walster, 1971). The hypothesis tested was that depressed subjects would exhibit greater psychophysiological arousal than nondepressed subjects following negative feedback but not after positive feedback.If depressed persons are more viscerally re-We are indebted to David J. Majernik of the