Cognitive distortion
A cognitive distortion is a thought that causes a person to perceive reality inaccurately due to being exaggerated or irrational.
[2] During difficult circumstances, these distorted thoughts can contribute to an overall negative outlook on the world and a depressive or anxious mental state.
[7] Beck first started to notice these automatic distorted thought processes when practicing psychoanalysis, while his patients followed the rule of saying anything that comes to mind.
The distorted thought processes led to focusing on degrading the self, amplifying minor external setbacks, experiencing other's harmless comments as ill-intended, while simultaneously seeing self as inferior.
These exaggerated perceptions, due to cognition, feel real and accurate because the schemas, after being reinforced through the behavior, tend to become 'knee-jerk' automatic and do not allow time for reflection.
[9] This cycle is also known as Beck's cognitive triad, focused on the theory that the person's negative schema applied to the self, the future, and the environment.
[10] In 1972, psychiatrist, psychoanalyst, and cognitive therapy scholar Aaron T. Beck published Depression: Causes and Treatment.
Beck's book provided a comprehensive and empirically supported theoretical model for depression—its potential causes, symptoms, and treatments.
In his book Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy, Burns described personal and professional anecdotes related to cognitive distortions and their elimination.
[12] When Burns published Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy, it made Beck's approach to distorted thinking widely known and popularized.
Nine years later, The Feeling Good Handbook was published, which was also built on Beck's work and includes a list of ten specific cognitive distortions that will be discussed throughout this article.
[15] John C. Gibbs and Granville Bud Potter propose four categories for cognitive distortions: self-centered, blaming others, minimizing-mislabeling, and assuming the worst.
[15] Rather than viewing herself as a complete failure for eating a spoonful of ice cream, the woman in the example could still recognize her overall effort to diet as at least a partial success.
Someone might use an unfavourable term to describe a complex person or event, such as assuming that a friend is upset with them due to a late reply to a text message, even though there could be various other reasons for the delay.
It is a more extreme form of jumping-to-conclusions cognitive distortion where one presumes to know the thoughts, feelings, or intentions of others without any factual basis.
Making "must" or "should" statements was included by Albert Ellis in his rational emotive behavior therapy (REBT), an early form of CBT; he termed it "musturbation".
This distortion is characterized by actively trying to prove one's actions or thoughts to be correct, and sometimes prioritizing self-interest over the feelings of another person.
Catastrophizing is a form of magnification where one gives greater weight to the worst possible outcome, however unlikely, or experiences a situation as unbearable or impossible when it is just uncomfortable.
Rather than assuming the behaviour to be accidental or otherwise extrinsic, one assigns a label to someone or something that is based on the inferred character of that person or thing.
[15] In a series of publications,[30][31][32] philosopher Paul Franceschi has proposed a unified conceptual framework for cognitive distortions designed to clarify their relationships and define new ones.
This conceptual framework posits two additional cognitive distortion classifications: the "omission of the neutral" and the "requalification in the other pole".
For example, a depressed male college student who experiences difficulty in dating might believe that his "worthlessness" causes women to reject him.
[36] Those diagnosed with narcissistic personality disorder tend, unrealistically, to view themselves as superior, overemphasizing their strengths and understating their weaknesses.
