Cognitive Model Of Depression

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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 …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

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