Objectives In daily life, many decisions of minor and major importance have to be made. Thereby, intuitive judgments serve as useful guides and help us to adapt to our environment. People with major depressive disorder (MDD) often have difficulties to come to decisions. Is their intuition impaired? Since this question has not been addressed until now, the present study explored intuition in MDD.

Methods Depressed patients (n = 29) and healthy control participants (n = 27) completed the Judgment of Semantic Coherence Task, a well‐established paradigm used in basic cognitive research to measure intuition. Furthermore, participants' severity of depressive symptoms (BDI‐II), negative affect (PANAS), and rumination (RSQ) were assessed. All participants were interviewed with the SCID.

Results Depressed patients showed impaired intuition compared to healthy control participants. In the depressed sample, negative affect accounts for the association between rumination and impaired intuition. Results further reveal that negative affect overall mediates the depression‐intuition relationship. Patients with diminished ability to concentrate or indecisiveness had lower intuition indices compared to patients who did not fulfil this diagnostic criterion of MDD.

Conclusions The study introduces the phenomenon of intuition into depression research. Additionally, these results extent findings from basic research showing that induced negative mood as well difficulties to down‐regulate negative affect impair intuitive coherence judgments. Current results indicate that the negative affectivity of patients is the crucial mediator in the association between depression and impaired intuition. Limitations of the study as well as the potential etiological role of intuition in MDD are discussed.