Cognitive therapy and its variants traditionally identify ten cognitive distortions that maintain negative thinking and help to maintain negative emotions. ^[1] Eliminating these distortions and negative thought is said to improve mood and discourage maladies such as depression and chronic anxiety. The process of learning to refute these distortions is called "cognitive restructuring". Cognitive therapy or cognitive behaviour therapy is a kind of psychotherapy used to treat depression, anxiety disorders, phobias, and other forms of mental disorder. ... Clinical depression (also called major depressive disorder, or sometimes unipolar when compared with bipolar disorder) is a state of intense sadness, melancholia or despair that has advanced to the point of being disruptive to an individuals social functioning and/or activities of daily living. ... This article includes a list of works cited but its sources remain unclear because it lacks in-text citations. ... In cognitive therapy the process of learning to refute cognitive distortions is called cognitive restructuring. ...

List

Related links are suggested in parentheses.

1. All-or-nothing thinking - Thinking of things in absolute terms, like "always", "every" or "never". Few aspects of human behavior are so absolute. (See false dilemma.)
2. Overgeneralization - Taking isolated cases and using them to make wide generalizations. (See hasty generalization.)
3. Mental filter - Focusing exclusively on certain, usually negative or upsetting, aspects of something while ignoring the rest, like a tiny imperfection in a piece of clothing. (See misleading vividness.)
4. Disqualifying the positive - Continually "shooting down" positive experiences for arbitrary, ad hoc reasons. (See special pleading.)
5. Jumping to conclusions - Assuming something negative where there is no evidence to support it. Two specific subtypes are also identified:
   • Mind reading - Assuming the intentions of others.
   • Fortune telling - Predicting how things will turn before they happen. (See slippery slope.)
6. Magnification and Minimization - Inappropriately understating or exaggerating the way people or situations truly are. Often the positive characteristics of other people are exaggerated and negative characteristics are understated. There is one subtype of magnification:
   • Catastrophizing - Focusing on the worst possible outcome, however unlikely, or thinking that a situation is unbearable or impossible when it is really just uncomfortable.
7. Emotional reasoning - Making decisions and arguments based on how you feel rather than objective reality. (See appeal to consequences.)
8. Making should statements - Concentrating on what you think "should" or ought to be rather than the actual situation you are faced with, or having rigid rules which you think should always apply no matter what the circumstances are. (See wishful thinking.)
9. Labeling - Related to overgeneralization, explaining by naming. Rather than describing the specific behavior, you assign a label to someone or yourself that puts them in absolute and unalterable terms.
10. Personalization (or attribution) - Assuming you or others directly caused things when that may not have been the case. (See illusion of control.) When applied to others this is an example of blame.

The logical fallacy of false dilemma (in some sources falsified dilemma), which is also known as fallacy of the excluded middle, false dichotomy, either/or dilemma or bifurcation, involves a situation in which two alternative points of view are held to be the only options, when in reality there exist... Hasty generalization, also known as fallacy of insufficient statistics, fallacy of insufficient sample, fallacy of the lonely fact, leaping to a conclusion, hasty induction, law of small numbers, unrepresentative sample or secundum quid, is the logical fallacy of reaching an inductive generalization based on too little evidence. ... The logical fallacy of misleading vividness involves describing some occurrence in vivid detail, even if it is an exceptional occurrence, to convince someone that it is a problem. ... Special pleading is a form of spurious argumentation where a position in a dispute introduces favorable details or excludes unfavorable details by alleging a need to apply additional considerations without proper criticism of these considerations themselves. ... In debate or rhetoric, the slippery slope is an argument for the likelihood of one event given another. ... Appeal to consequences, also known as argumentum ad consequentiam (Latin: argument to the consequences), is an argument that concludes a premise (typically a belief) to be either true or false based on whether the premise leads to desirable or undesirable consequences. ... Wishful thinking is the formation of beliefs and making decisions according to what might be pleasing to imagine instead of by appealing to evidence or rationality. ... In copyright law, attribution is the requirement to acknowledge or credit the author of a work which is used or appears in another work. ... The illusion of control is the tendency for human beings to believe they can control or at least influence outcomes which they clearly cannot. ...

See also

• Cognitive bias
• Emotional memory
• Language and thought
• List of cognitive biases
• Negativity effect

A cognitive bias is any of a wide range of observer effects identified in cognitive science and social psychology including very basic statistical, social attribution, and memory errors that are common to all human beings. ... Emotional memory is an element of the Stanislavski System, an approach to acting. ... A variety of different authors, theories and fields purport influences between language and thought. ... Cognitive bias is distortion in the way humans perceive reality (see also cognitive distortion). ... The negativity effect is an attributional bias that occurs when subjects are asked what they think caused actions of other people whom they dislike. ...

References

1. ^ Beck, Aaron T. Cognitive Therapy and the Emotional Disorders. International Universities Press Inc., 1975. ISBN 0-8236-0990-1

Aaron Temkin Beck (born July 18, 1921) is an American psychiatrist and a professor emeritus at the department of psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania. ... 1975 (MCMLXXV) was a common year starting on Wednesday. ...

External links

• Definition of cognitive distortions
• About.com: depression: What are cognitive distortions?