A cognitive/behavioral model of depression emphasizing the self-control processes of self-monitoring, self-evaluation, and self-reinforcement views self-control as a set of processes by which an individual maintains responses in the relative absence of immediate external reinforcement. The relationship between self-evaluation, attributional style, and clinical depression was examined for 19 depressed and 12 nondepressed psychiatric inpatients and 16 nondepressed nonpsychiatric controls. Subjects were administered a verbal recognition task to assess their self-evaluation patterns. The results offered only partial support for the self-control model of depression. The depressed patients demonstrated lower expectations for their performance prior to undertaking the task, lower estimations of their performance following the task, and lower levels of satisfaction with their task performance than the nondepressed nonpsychiatric controls. Their performance on these measures, however, was indistinguishable from that of the nondepressed patients, thereby raising questions regarding the specificity of self-evaluation deficits to depression. Results suggest that the validity of conceptualizing clinical depression may be only quantitatively different from mild depression due to the implications of experimentally manipulating success and failure experiences. (Author)