PATH 07 - Depression explanations 2 (Part 1) Flashcards
(13 cards)
What is the cognitive approach?
The ‘cognitive’ has come to mean ‘mental processes’, so this approach is focused on how our mental processes (e.g. thoughts, perception, attention) affect behaviour
What are the two cognitive explanations for depression?
- Beck’s negative triad model
- Ellis’s ABC model
Who came up with the negative triad?
Aaron Beck
What is the 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 vulnerable to depressional
What is faulty information processing?
- When depressed individuals attend to the negative aspects of a situation and ignore positives
- Depressed people may tend towards ‘black and white thinking’ where something either all bad or all good
What is a negative self-schema?
They interpret all information about themselves in a negative way. They are often acquired through childhood
What is a schema?
- A mental framework of beliefs and expectations that influence cognitive processing
- They are developed from experience e.g. you have a scheme of a chair which is something with legs that you can sit on
- As we get older our schema become more detailed and sophisticated
- Schema enable us to process lots of information quickly and this is useful as a sort of mental shortcut that prevents us from being overwhelmed by environmental stimuli
- However, schema may also distort our interpretations of sensory information, leading to perceptual errors
What are the three negative kinds of thinking?
- Negative view of the world => this creates the impression that there is no hope anywhere
- Negative view of the future => such thoughts reduce any hopefulness and enhance depression
- Negative view of the self => such thoughts enhance existing depressive feelings because they confirm the existing emotions of low self-esteem
What are the strength’s of Beck’s negative triad model?
- Has supporting research
- Has real world applications
What supporting research is there for Beck’s negative triad model?
- One strength generally of Beck’s cognitive model of depression is the existence of supporting research
- ‘Cognitive vulnerability’ refers to ways of thinking that may predispose a person to becoming depressed, for example faulty information processing, negative self-schema and the cognitive triad
- In a review David Clark and Aaron Beck (1999) concluded that not only were these cognitive vulnerabilities more common in depressed people but they preceded the depression
- This was confirmed in a more recent prospective study by Joseph Cohen et al. (2019)
- They tracked the development of 473 adolescents, regularly measuring cognitive vulnerability
- It was found that showing cognitive vulnerability predicted later depression
- This shows that there is an association between cognitive vulnerability and depression
What are the real world applications of Beck’s negative triad model?
- A further strength of Beck’s cognitive model of depression is its applications in screening and treatment for depression
- Cohen et al. concluded that assessing cognitive vulnerability allows psychologists to screen young people, identifying those most at risk of developing depression in the future and monitoring them
- Understanding cognitive vulnerability can also be applied in cognitive behaviour therapy (CBT)
- These therapies work by altering the kind of cognitions that make people vulnerable to depression, making them more resilient to negative life events
- This means that an understanding of cognitive vulnerability is useful in more than one aspect of clinical practice
What are the limitations of Beck’s negative triad model?
It is only a partial explanation for depression
How is Beck’s negative triad model only a partial explanation for depression?
- There seems to be no doubt that depressed people show particular patterns of cognition, and that these can be seen before the onset of depression
- It therefore appears that Beck’s suggestion of cognitive vulnerabilities is at least a partial explanation for depression
- Although there is a clear association between cognitive vulnerability and depression, there are some aspects to depression that are not particularly well explained by cognitive explanations and this model
- For example, some depressed people feel extreme anger, and some experience hallucinations and delusions
