Beck

• Beck’s cognitive triad

  Faulty information processing: This is when depressed people attend to negative aspects of a situation and ignore the positives. People also tend to blow small problems out of proportion and think in ‘black-and-white’ terms, distorting their information. Seen with:

  • OVERGENERALISATION = make sweeping conclusions based on a single event.
  • CATASTROPHISING = exaggerate a minor setback and believe that it's a complete disaster.
• Beck’s cognitive triad

  Negative self-schemas: Beck claimed that depression is caused by negative self-schemas, maintaining the cognitive triad, which is a negative and irrational view of; ourselves, our future, and the world around us (the ‘negative triad).

  (Schema => A ‘package’ of knowledge which stores information and ideas about our self and the world around us).
• ✓ - Supporting research.

  Cohen et al. 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.
• ✓ - Real-world application.

  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.
• ✓ - Real-world application (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.
• X - A partial explanation.

  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. However, there are some aspects to depression that are not particularly well explained by cognitive explanations. For example, some depressed people feel extreme anger, and some experience hallucinations and delusions.