Cognitive vulnerability

Abstract: I propose that the ways people respond to their own symptoms of depression influence the duration of these symptoms. People who engage in ruminative responses to depression, focusing on their symptoms and the possible causes and consequences of their symptoms, will show longer depressions than people who take action to distract themselves from their symptoms. Ruminative responses prolong depression because they allow the depressed mood to negatively bias thinking and interfere with instrumental behavior and problem-solving. Laboratory and field studies directly testing this theory have supported its predictions. I discuss how response styles can explain the greater likelihood of depression in women than men. Then I intergrate this response styles theory with studies of coping with discrete events. The response styles theory is compared to other theories of the duration of depression. Finally, I suggest what may help a depressed person to stop engaging in ruminative responses and how response styles for depression may develop.

Abstract: Summary and Future Directions On the basis of the aforementioned studies, the hopelessnesstheory appears promising However, further research is neededFor example, although powerful tests of the attributional diath-esis-stress component have been conducted, no one has exam-ined the cognitive diatheses of inferring negative consequencesor characteristics about the self or whether the cognitive stylediathesis-stress interaction predicts clinically significant de-pression Moreover, it is crucial to determine if this interactionpredicts the development of the hypothesized symptoms ofhopelessness depression More generally, an important short-coming of the prior work is that it has not focused on the symp-toms of hopelessness depression in particular and, instead, sim-ply has examined the symptoms of depression in general Fu-ture investigators need to test more fine-grained predictionsabout the hypothesized symptoms of hopelessness depressionThe issue of the stability of the cognitive diatheses has not beenresolved satisfactorily We have only begun, in a preliminaryway, to investigate the issues of specific vulnerability and media-tional processes Finally, further tests of the predictions aboutcourse, cure, and prevention are needed We eagerly await thisresearchDifficult methodological issues may arise in the search forhopelessness depression, however For example, the hopeless-ness theory is silent about the time lag between formation ofhopelessness and onset of the symptoms of hopelessness depres-sion If it is very short, then a major challenge will be to developmethods with sufficient temporal resolving power to determineif hopelessness indeed precedes the occurrence of the hypothe-sized symptoms of hopelessness depression (see Alloy, Hartlage,et al, 1988, for proposed methods for testing the hopelessnesstheory) The results of work to test the hopelessness theory willdetermine if the concept of hopelessness depression needs tobe revised For example, perhaps the statement of the causalpathway is correc t bu culminate n a differen se f symp-toms than those currently hypothesized to compose hopeless-ness depression In this case, the symptom—but not thecause—component of the hopelessness theory would need to bemodifiedIn discussing how to search for hopelessness depression, wenote the possibility that future work may not corroborate theexistence of hopelessness depression as a bona fide subtype withcharacteristic cause, symptoms, course, treatment, and preven-tion Instead, the etiological chain featured in the hopelessnesstheory may be one of many pathways to a final common out-come of depression In this case, it would be more compellingto speak of a hopelessness cause, as opposed to a hopelessnesssubtype, of depression

Abstract: A review of recent research on cognitive processing indicates that biases in attention, memory, and interpretation, as well as repetitive negative thoughts, are common across emotional disorders, although they vary in form according to type of disorder. Current cognitive models emphasize specific forms of biased processing, such as variations in the focus of attention or habitual interpretative styles that contribute to the risk of developing particular disorders. As well as predicting risk of emotional disorders, new studies haveprovided evidence of a causal relationship between processing bias and vulnerability. Beyond merely demonstrating the existence of biased processing, research is thus beginning to explore the cognitive causes of emotional vulnerability, and their modification.