the cognitive approach to depression Flashcards
what are the behavioural characteristics of depression?
change in activity levels, social withdrawal, and disruption to sleep plus eating behaviour.
What are the emotional characteristics of depression?
lowered mood, anger towards self or others, and low self esteem.
what are the cognitive characteristics of depression?
poor concentration, dwelling on the negative, and absolutist thinking.
Describe ELIS ABC model.
Ellis believed that depression is caused by irrational beliefs, which prevent us from being happy and pain free.
Elis ABC model has 3 steps to it:
1. Activating effect: event that triggers irrational beliefs.
2. Belief: people with depression form an irrational belief, when interpreting the activating effect.
3. consequence: the consequence of irrational thought, which is depression and sadness.
describe Becks negative triad.
Becks also believed that irrational thoughts lead to depression, but instead, he categorised them into something called the negative triad.
The negative triad has 3 parts to it, those being the:
1. Negative thoughts about yourself
2.negative thoughts about the future(ex: I will fail my test tomorrow)
3. Negative thoughts about the world ( how other people view you).
He believed two factors maintained this negative triad:
NEGATIVE SCHEMAS. he believed that this negative schema is formed from all your bad experiences, and that this schema now makes you have irrational beliefs.
COGNITIVE BIAS: when someone chooses to pay attention only to some types of information.
People with depression have negative cognitive bias, meaning that they only focus on the negative things, and not the positive ones.
what is the main type of way to treat depression?
cognitive behavioural therapy ( CBT).
explain how CBT works.
therapy used to remove negative beliefs which cause depression.
- Identify irrational, negative beliefs.
-using the negative triad. - challenge the negative beliefs
- help the patient find reasons why those irrational beliefs are wrong. - test his hypothesis.
- the therapist sets homework, for the patient to gather evidence for situation that either support, or don’t support his negative beliefs, outside of therapy. - evaluate the evidence and put it together. Could be in a diary.
outline the strength for Becks theory
RESEARCH SUPPORT: Koster et al, conducted a study to investigate attentional abilities of people with major depression, and to compare this to a normal control group.
30 university students took part in the study.
the participants in the study, stood in front of a computer screen.
A square appeared on either the left side or right side of the screen. The participants were asked to press a button as soon as they could, in order to indicate where the square had appeared.
but before this, a distractor word appeared on the screen. The word could have been either negative, neutral, or positive.
the results show that participants with major depression took longer than the control group, to press on the button, when the negative distractor word appeared. But they didn’t take longer to press the button when the neutral or positive word was on.
This therefore proves that people with depression have a negative cognitive bias.
What are the weaknesses of Becks theory and Ellis theory?
Irrational negative beliefs may not be the only cause to depression, thereby be other factors such as genetics involved. McGuffin et al found a concordance rate of depression for monozygotic twins, was 46%, and the concordance rate for dizygotic twins to be 20%. This therefore suggests that some genetic factors may also contribute to depression.
Ellis: Puts all blame on the participants ( psychological harm plus distress).
what are the strengths of cognitive behavioural therapy?
Cupjers Et al conducted a meta-analysis, and looked at all the studies which had investigated CBT for treatment of depression in America.
in all of the studies involved, there were two levels of the IV. One group was treated with CBT, and one group was not treated at all.
The results show that the group with CBT, had overall experienced a significant improvement in symptoms.
This suggests that CBT can be effective.
CP: Ethnocentric bias, because study was only conducted in America.
What are the weaknesses of CBT?
1.The fact that CBT doesn’t work for everyone.
- May not be as effective as drug therapy.
