The Psychological Theory of Depression (AQA GCSE Psychology): Revision Note

Influence of nurture: the role of negative schemas in depression

• The psychological explanation of depression assumes that mental processes such as thoughts, ideas, and perceptions affect behaviour

• Irrational and faulty thinking characterise the depressed person’s state of mind 

• Aaron Beck (1967) explained depression as a vulnerability that can be brought about by faulty thinking and negative schemas

  • A schema is a shortcut in thinking that acts as a mental framework for the individual

  • A self-schema is the ‘packet’ of information someone has collected about themselves

  • A depressed person will have a negative self-schema, which means they interpret all of the information about themselves negatively, for example:

    • An ineptness schema means that they believe they will fail at everything they try

    • A negative self-evaluation schema means they will constantly remind themselves of their worthlessness

• Reality does not have any meaning to the depressed person; they are likely to develop a dysfunctional view of themselves even in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary

• Beck suggests that a depressed person has three elements of negative thinking and these are called the negative triad:

  • Negative view of the self: I am worthless/ unimportant/ useless/ a waste of time 

  • Negative view of the world: Everyone is against me 

  • Negative view of the future: I am never going to amount to anything

Influence of nurture: the role of attribution in depression

• Attribution refers to how people make sense of their own or other people’s behaviour, for example:

  • ‘He’s frowning because I’ve annoyed him’

  • ‘Why did I say that? I must be a really stupid person’

  • ‘She was so nice to me; she is a really lovely person’

• Seligman proposed that some people have a depressive or negative attributional style, made up of three dimensions which may be positive or negative depending on the person making the attribution:

  • Internal attributions: a depressed person will always blame themselves for anything that goes wrong, for example:

    • ‘We lost that big order at work; it’s my fault, I should have tried harder’

  • Stable attributions: a depressed person will tend to think in absolutist ways which persist over time, for example:

    • ‘ People will never like me again’

  • Global attributions: a depressed person will over-generalise so that one specific incident is blown into huge proportions, for example:

    • ‘I can’t ever get anything right; everything I do is wrong’

• Such attributions make it difficult to see that things can change and there is hope, and this pattern of thinking is what Seligman termed the 'depressive attributional style'

Evaluation of the psychological explanation of depression

Strengths

• There is research support: Seligman found dogs given inescapable electric shocks later stopped trying to escape shocks they could have avoided

  • This supports the idea that people learn to 'give up' when facing challenges, leading to depression

• Real-world application: cognitive behaviour therapy (CBT) treats depression by correcting faulty, irrational thinking, supporting the idea that such thinking underlies the disorder

Weaknesses

• A negative attributional style may simply be realistic rather than depressive

  • Alloy and Abramson (1979) found depressed people gave more accurate estimates of disaster likelihood than non-depressed people — 'sadder but wiser'

• Schemas and attributions are difficult to operationalise and measure, as they are internal cognitive mechanisms