Cognitive Distortions Flashcards
Name ten cognitive distortions
- Mental filter
- Jumping to conclusions
- Personalisation
- Catastrophising
- Black and white thinking.
- Shoulding and musting
- Overgeneralisation
- Labelling
- Emotional reasoning
- Magnification and minimisation.
Mental filter
This thinking involved a filtering in and filtering out process - a sort of tunnel vision, focusing on only one part of a situation and ignoring the rest.
Usually this means looking at the negative parts of a situation and forgetting about the positive parts, and the whole picture is coloured by what may be a single negative detail.
Jumping to conclusions
When we assume we know what someone else is thinking (tunnel vision), and when we make predictions about what is going to happen in the future (predictive thinking).
Personalisation
This involves blaming yourself for everything that goes wrong or could go wrong, even when you may only be partly responsible or not responsible at all. You may be taking 100% responsibility for the occurrence of external events.
Catastrophising
This occurs when we blow things out of proportion, snd we view the situation as terrible, awful, dreadful, and horrible, even when the reality is that the problem is quite small.
Black and white thinking
This thinking involves seeing only one extreme or the other. You are either right or wrong, good or bad and so on. There are no in-betweens or shades of grey.
Shoulding and musting
Sometimes by saying “I should” or “I must”, you can put unreasonable demands or pressure on yourself.
Overgeneralisation
When we overgeneralise, we take one instance in the past or present and impose it on all current or future situations. If we say “you always..,” or “I never …,” then we are probably overgeneralising.
Labelling
We label ourselves and others when we make global statements based on behaviour in specific situations.
We might use this label even though there are many more examples that aren’t consistent with that label.
Emotional reasoning
This thinking involves basing your view of situations or yourself on the way you are feeling. For example, the only evidence that something bad is going to happen is that you feel like something bad is going to happen.
Magnification snd minimalisation
In this thinking style, you magnify the positive attributes of other people and minimise your own positive attributes. It’s as though you’re explaining away your own positive characteristics.
