Abstract: This research is designed to explore depressed people 's characters on goal setting as well as their self-evaluation and attribution styles. Participants in this experiment were 20 depressive neurosis patients (DN), 13 major depression patients (DE) (both DN and DE were diagnosed according to the Chinese Classitication of Mental Disorder-2-R) and 29 normal people as the control group (CO). All Ss were required to expect their goals pre-and post-performance in the Solitaire task, then express their satisfactory degree to their own performance and attribution to related factors. The results showed that : (1) Goal setting in depressed people was similar with those in the CO group during the tasks; (2) The actual performance was related with the score of self-efficacy, (3)DN group and DE group showed more apparent negative tendency of self-attribution than those in the CO group.

Key words: depressed group, goal setting, self-evaluation