The cognitive approach to explaining depression Flashcards
What is depression?
A mental disorder characterised by low mood and energy levels.
What was Beck’s negative triad?
Beck proposed that there are three kinds of negative thinking that contribute to becoming depressed:
Negative views of the world, the future and the self.
Such negative views lead a person to interpret their experiences in a negative way and so make them more vulnrable to depression.
What is faulty information processing?
When depressed people attend to the negative aspects of a situation and ignore positives.
What is a negative self schema?
A package of ideas an information developed through experience. They act as a mental framework for the interpretation of sensory information.
A self-schema is the package of information people have about themselves.
So if a person has a negative self-schema they interpret all information about themselves in a negative way.
What was Beck’s negative triad?
Negative views of the world- ‘The world is a hard place’
Negative view of the future- ‘ there isn’t much chance that the economy will really get better’ - Thoughts that reduce any hopefulness and enhance depression
negative view of the self- ‘I am a failure’- Low self-esteem.
Strengths of becks negative triad model.
Personal life events are taken into account and are recognised as a starting point of depression.
Cohen et al. (2019) supported Beck’s findings, they tracked 473 adolescents, ensuring they measured their cognitive vulnerability regularly and found that those who had shown cognitive vulnerability predicted depression later on.
Enabled treatments to be made such as cognitive behaviour therapy.
Limitations of Becks negative triad
It does not explain the symptoms of depression, such as why different people may feel different things.
What was Ellis’s ABC model?
He proposed that depression occurs when an activating event (A) triggers an irrational belief (B) which in turn produces a consequence (C).
Activating event- Failing a test or ending a relationship.
Beliefs- Musturbation- It is a disaster if something does not go smoothly.
Utopianism- life is always meant to be fair.
Consequence- When an activating event triggers irrational beliefs there are emotional and behavioural consequences.
Strengths of Ellis’s ABC model.
Rational Emotive Behaviour Therapy (REBT) led following the ABC model has been successful in treating depression.
David et al. (2018) stated that REBT can both change negative beliefs and change the symptoms of depression.
Limitations of Ellis’s ABC model.
It does not explain all symptoms of depression- exhaustion, anger.
Because it gives responsibility to the depressed person it could be seen as they are blaming them.
It only reacts to reactive depression and not endogenous depression.
