The Psychological Theory of Depression (AQA GCSE Psychology)

• 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

• 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’
• Abramson et al. (1978) developed attributional style theory which identifies three dimensions of attribution which may be positive or negative in nature, 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:
    • ‘Everyone at work will think I’m an idiot and won’t ever want to work with 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’
• The above examples form what Seligman (2002) termed the ‘depressive attributional style, and is indicative of the dysfunctional thinking of depressed people

Evaluation of the psychological explanation of depression

Strengths

• Seligman et al. (1979) supports the idea of attributions as an explanation for depression:
• 143 student participants completed an attributional style scale
• The scale used Beck’s Depression Inventory to identify which of the participants were depressed
• The results showed that the depressed participants attributed negative outcomes to internal, stable, and global causes i.e. they blamed themselves 
• The depressed participants also attributed positive outcomes to external, unstable causes i.e. a good result or outcome had nothing to do with them (in their mind)
• The psychological explanation of depression is more holistic than the biological explanation as it considers the whole person and how they view themselves, others and the world

Weaknesses

• Having a negative attributional style may not necessarily be a bad thing, it may simply mean that someone is realistic about themselves, the world and others
• It is very difficult to operationalise and measure schemas and attributions as these are cognitive mechanisms which are not easy to distil or pin down