Mr. Bernanke, speaking at a luncheon in Minneapolis, offered the standard explanations, including the absence of home construction and the deep and lingering pain inflicted by financial crises. He warned again that reductions in government spending amount to reductions in short-term growth.

Then he said something new: Consumers are depressed beyond reason or expectation.

Oh, sure, there are reasons to be depressed, and the Fed chairman rattled them off: “The persistently high level of unemployment, slow gains in wages for those who remain employed, falling house prices, and debt burdens that remain high.”

However, Mr. Bernanke continued, “Even taking into account the many financial pressures that they face, households seem exceptionally cautious.”

Consumers, in other words, are behaving as if the economy is even worse than it actually is.

Economic models based on historic patterns of unemployment, wages, debt and housing prices suggest that people should be spending more money. Instead, just as corporations are sitting on their money, households are holding back, too.

Why? Well, one possibility is that Americans collectively are suffering from what amounts to an economic version of post-traumatic stress disorder.

“People are on edge waiting for the other shoe to drop,” John Williams, the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, told the Seattle Rotary Club on Wednesday. “In fact, the latest consumer sentiment readings are near the all-time lows recorded in late 2008 during the most terrifying moments of the financial crisis.”

Moreover, the national mood is souring. Although the economy has grown this year — albeit slowly — surveys of consumer confidence keep finding increasing pessimism about the future.

Mr. Williams noted a recent survey finding that 62 percent of households expected their income to stay the same or decline over the next year, the bleakest outlook in the last three decades.

“It’s hard to have a robust recovery,” he said, “when Americans are so dispirited.”

There is a longstanding debate among economists about the importance of confidence. Research has found that consumers are not very good at predicting the future. Optimism often fails to correlate with growth; pessimism doesn’t necessarily foreshadow a recession.

Still, it seems intuitive that a lack of confidence can drag on the economy. As pessimistic people pull back — deciding that there is no point in looking for work; that this is not the year to go on vacation; that it may make sense to stop eating in restaurants — the economy shrinks.

There is a natural instinct to address this problem by trying to cheer people up. Mr. Bernanke in recent speeches has been careful to note that he continues to think that the American economy has a bright future.

There is also the possibility, however, that the national mood is a more accurate reflection of the economic reality than any of the other, sunnier statistics.

“Confidence is mostly reflective of fundamentals,” said Eric Sims, a professor of economics at the University of Notre Dame. As a result, he said, the only way to cheer people up is to improve the condition of the economy. “You’ve got to give people a reason to have confidence.”

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