Cognitive Model Of Depression

4. According to the cognitive model, depression can be influenced by biology, biochemistry, or behavior (reading). Each one of these components is treated as a different level of analysis. Depression is learned, but it can be unlearned; that is, according to Aaron Beck’s cognitive model, depression can be produced through your negative thought processes about the self, future and the world. We refer to this as the “cognitive triad of depression” (reading). These negative biases can lead to automatic thoughts, which precipitate depression. Depressed people often distort their interpretation of events in order to maintain the cognitive triad of depression. A depressed person is also more likely to have negative schema. A person may have adopted attitudes or beliefs through their experiences that prove maladaptive. These schema will remain dormant until an event actives them. Then, the person will encode information in a way that maintains these schemas. Thus, negative self-schema promotes the distortion of events, which then leads to a negative view of the environment, the self, and the future. Fortunately, cognitive-behavior therapy helps the depressed patient change their way of thinking. When they form new self-schema, it will have an inhibitory relationship with the old self-schema. According to the reading, recent research suggests that cognitive-behavior therapy is just as effective as medicine. Cognitive-behavior therapy aims to give a person the tools to avoid depression. Two treatments of this therapy are distancing and decentering. Distancing involves looking at one’s thoughts from a distance and understanding that they are something that comes and goes, not the absolute truth. Decentering involves understanding that you are not the center of the universe and that not everyone’s actions have to do with you. Depression can also be caused by a lack of reinforcement. The lack of reinforcement could be for different reasons, such as deprivations in the environment, lack of certain skill sets, or the person may belong to a category that cannot be reinforced (lecture). Learned helplessness plays a large role in maintaining …show more content…
While most researchers equate it with a high level of pessimism, the learned helplessness experiment by Seligman helps to explain it better detail. There are two parts of the experiment- one for humans and one for animals, or in this case, a dog. For the dog, the scientists strapped its paws to the floor and exposed it to non-lethal electric shocks, which we will refer to as the uncontrollable aversive stimuli. At first, the animal tries to escape, but it fails, and it soon learns that the uncontrollable aversive stimulus is uncontrollable. When a means of escape is made available, via a door, and unstrap the dog, it does not try to escape, and the scientists must show it that it is possible to escape from the electric shocks. With humans, the electric shocks are replaced with anagrams. In this case, a group of people are given anagrams to solve, but they are unsolvable. However, in the test phase, the anagrams are solvable. The group that was exposed to the unsolvable anagrams solved fewer ones than those in the control group, and they often gave up, reporting that they felt awful (lecture). According to the textbook, there is now a good amount of research that suggests that when people believe that they cannot control events, they develop a sense of helplessness, and in extreme cases, they may lose interests in all other activities in their lives. In contrast, when people believe that they have an impact on