Cognitive biases in patients with depression

Nowadays, people's pace of life is getting faster and faster, and with it comes the increasing pressure of life and work. Due to long-term work and lack of rest, many people suffer from depression. Depression is a relatively serious mental illness. During the illness, patients must receive timely treatment and their caregivers must also do a good job of related nursing work. So, what are the cognitive biases that people with depression have?

1. There is a bias in the attribution of depression

Patients tend to attribute negative events to themselves, the whole, and lasting; and to attribute positive events to others, local, and temporary. This is significantly different from the attribution pattern of normal people.

2. Negative Self-Schema

Everyone has a self-schema about themselves, the world around them, and the future. This schema often affects people's thinking, emotions, behavior, and other aspects. The self-schema of patients with depression has negative deviations, which is often formed during adolescence under the influence of some loss events such as death of parents, exclusion from peers, and criticism from teachers. They view everything around them negatively and tend to see themselves as "losers". Stress can easily activate this negative self-schema, leading to depressive episodes, which in turn reinforce this schema, leading to a vicious cycle.

There are two essential negative self-schemas in patients with depression: dependency and self-blame. People with strong dependencies often feel the changes in their situation deeply when faced with stressful life events, leading to depressive episodes. For those individuals who often blame themselves, they often demand perfection from themselves and blame themselves for everything, so everything they have now means failure, which can also lead to depression.

Normal people also have cognitive biases in their self-evaluation. When they do things well, they often overestimate their abilities, and when they do things poorly, they emphasize some external factors. This "optimistic" approach is very necessary for maintaining physical and mental health. Patients with depression are just the opposite. When things go well, they often emphasize some external factors, and when things go badly, they underestimate their own abilities, which often leads to illness.

3. Automatic thinking

Negative automatic thinking manifests itself as numerous negative ideas and various systematic logical errors. Common logical errors include subjective assumptions, selective attention, over-extension, absolute thinking of either this or that, etc. However, most patients are not aware that they have these thoughts before they have unpleasant emotions, because these thoughts have become part of their way of thinking and affect their emotions, behaviors and other aspects, becoming one of the important characteristics of depression.

4. Negative coping styles

Coping style plays an important role in the onset of depression. Depressed patients tend to use negative coping styles more often and less positive coping styles.