thinking styles case study

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Scientific thinking styles: The different ways of thinking in psychoanalytic case studies

Affiliations.

1 Department of Psychosocial and Psychoanalytic Studies, University of Essex, Colchester, UK.
2 Psychological Sciences Research Institute, Université catholique de Louvain, Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium.
PMID: 33952138
DOI: 10.1080/00207578.2020.1796491

Historian and philosopher John Forrester argues that psychoanalysis is characterized by a style of scientific thinking and reasoning that he coins "thinking in cases". Since Freud, case studies have been used as a medium for sharing, demonstrating, discovering, expanding, consolidating and "thinking" psychoanalytic knowledge. In this paper, we seek to clarify and enrich Forrester's idea of thinking in cases. We first attend to issues around the lack of definition for thinking styles, and we propose a more detailed description for what might constitute a scientific thinking style. Second, we outline how thinking in cases differs from other kinds of thinking styles. In doing so, we argue that some of the criticisms directed at case studies are the result of a confusion between statistical and experimental thinking styles and thinking in cases. Finally, we propose that there is more than one way of thinking in cases. We distinguish between cases as exemplars for analytic generalization, cases as exemplars for analogical learning, and cases in the service of empirical generalization. By making these implicit thinking styles explicit, we seek to demonstrate the importance of case studies at all levels of psychoanalysis: clinical, research, training and teaching.

Keywords: Freudian theory; applied psychoanalysis; history of psychoanalysis; philosophy.

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Response to "Scientific thinking styles". Szajnberg NM. Szajnberg NM. Int J Psychoanal. 2021 Feb;102(1):189-190. doi: 10.1080/00207578.2020.1848394. Int J Psychoanal. 2021. PMID: 33951998 No abstract available.
Letter to the Editor. Kaluzeviciute G. Kaluzeviciute G. Int J Psychoanal. 2021 Feb;102(1):191-193. doi: 10.1080/00207578.2021.1880715. Int J Psychoanal. 2021. PMID: 33952003 No abstract available.

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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Predictive roles of thinking styles in coping strategies among mainland postgraduate students in hong kong.

$\nSiyao Chen$

Faculty of Education, University of Hong Kong, Pokfulam, Hong Kong SAR, China

The primary objective of the present research was to explore the statistical predictive power of thinking styles in coping strategies beyond demographic factors. One hundred and forty-eight mainland postgraduate students were administered to the Thinking Styles Inventory-Revised II (TSI-R2) and the Coping Orientation to Problems Experienced (COPE) Revised. Results indicated that Type I thinking styles primarily predicted adaptive coping strategies, while Type II thinking styles positively contributed to maladaptive coping strategies. Results in the present research were largely in the expected directions beyond the influence of demographic factors. Furthermore, thinking styles varied as a function of age, gender, gender-role orientation, and marital status. Implications for postgraduate students, academics, university administrators, and the limitations of the research, are discussed.

Introduction

With the internationalization of higher education, a growing number of mainland postgraduate students have been attracted to Hong Kong and taken up the largest proportion of non-local students. For example, in 2019–2020, there were 6,964 non-local postgraduate students, accounting for 61.9% of registered postgraduate students in eight government-funded universities in Hong Kong. Of non-local postgraduate students, 5,831 mainland postgraduate students occupied the largest proportion of 83.5% ( University Grants Committee, 2020 ). Thus, the group of mainland postgraduate students in Hong Kong deserves much attention. However, previous studies reported that these students face high levels of stressors in fields of acculturation ( Bhowmik et al., 2018 ), academic sojourn ( Brown and Holloway, 2008 ), and psychological stress ( Yu et al., 2019 ). These are harmful to their emotional, psychosocial, psychological aspects, and academic performance ( Demes and Geeraert, 2015 ; Tummala-Narra et al., 2016 ). Therefore, to cope with these stressful situations, coping strategies are of great significance to these specific cohorts of students.

Intellectual styles, preferred ways of performing tasks or processing information ( Zhang and Sternberg, 2005 ), have been statistically proven to be significant in both academic and non-academic settings ( Zhang, 2017 ). As the most general and comprehensive model, thinking styles served as representatives of intellectual styles. Firstly, thinking styles are one of the most comprehensive style constructs. This style construct identifies an individual's styles in five dimensions and covers all three traditions in the field of intellectual styles ( Sternberg, 1997 ). Secondly, thinking styles are the original and theoretical foundations of intellectual styles, which help to better understand the theory of intellectual styles. Coping strategies are conceptualized as the reactions of individuals to stress conditions related to potentially negative consequences ( Folkman and Lazarus, 1984 ). Previous empirical studies have revealed the relationships between coping strategies and other variables in aspects of personal factors ( Lue et al., 2010 ), environmental factors, and other individual-difference variables. Nevertheless, according to the last category, limited studies have focused on examining factors influencing coping strategies in intellectual styles ( Gras et al., 2009 ; Yuan et al., 2017 ). Findings on their relationships enrich the empirical evidence on both two constructs. Furthermore, previous studies have also proved the value of thinking styles in individual-difference variables. Firstly, adaptive Type I thinking styles have been widely proved to be correlated with positive individual variables. For instance, Type I thinking styles are positively linked to future time perspectives, a mature defense style, academic performance, and higher levels of cognitive development ( Zhang, 2002 ; Karagiannopoulou and Christodoulides, 2005 ; Kuan and Zhang, 2020 ). Secondly, thinking styles also exhibited predicting powers in individual-difference variables. For instance, Type I thinking styles play predicting roles in academic performance, critical thinking dispositions, and sense of purposefulness ( Zhang, 2002 , 2003 , 2004 ). However, there are also controversies over relationships between thinking styles and some other variables. For instance, inconsistent findings have been yielded over the relationships between thinking styles and coping strategies ( Appelhans and Schmeck, 2002 ; Gras et al., 2009 ). The statistical predictions of thinking styles in coping strategies also remained under-explored. Therefore, to fill in these gaps, the present study aimed to examine the predicting roles of thinking styles in coping strategies among mainland postgraduate students in Hong Kong.

Demographic factors (i.e., age, gender, marital status, and socioeconomic status) can be considered as one of the significant determinants influencing thinking styles. However, controversies over the influences of age on thinking styles have been detected ( Zhang and He, 2011 ; Al-Thani et al., 2014 ; Kuan and Zhang, 2020 ). Similarly, different perspectives have also been made on the functions of gender on thinking styles ( Witkin and Berry, 1975 ; Balkis and Isiker, 2005 ; Gridley, 2006 ). Some scholars believed that gender exerts impacts on thinking styles ( Balkis and Isiker, 2005 ; Zhang and Sternberg, 2006 ), while others contended that no gender difference exists in thinking styles ( Grigorenko and Sternberg, 1997 ; Gridley, 2006 ). The latter view can be accounted for by social role orientations. Men and women are brought up with different social expectations ( Vaught, 1965 ) and attitudes ( Maccoby and Jacklin, 1974 ), which may lead to different preferences for thinking styles. Nevertheless, some women who are raised and possess past experiences similar to those more typical of men might possess a masculine self-concept ( Bem and Lenney, 1976 ). Thus, those women might possess similar thinking styles to men. Nevertheless, few studies simultaneously consider both social role orientations and their gender in relationships with thinking styles. Marital status is significant to postgraduate students ( Poyrazli and Kavanaugh, 2006 ) and is closely associated with thinking styles. Both constructs have their own relationships with career ambition, social adjustment strain, perceived stress, social support, motivations, self-efficacy, self-esteem, and well-being ( Poyrazli and Kavanaugh, 2006 ; Fan, 2016 ). However, the comparison of married and unmarried postgraduate students in the direct relationship of thinking styles is still under-explored. Socioeconomic status has been statistically proven to be significant in postgraduate study ( Watson et al., 2010 ; Han et al., 2014 ) and is one of the factors influencing thinking styles ( Alevriadou et al., 2004 ). Besides, disciplines also show inevitable influences on thinking styles due to unique identities and the nature of various academics ( Becher, 1981 ; Pettigrew and King, 1993 ). Furthermore, contradictory findings have also been found in the thinking styles among students of social science ( Balkis and Isiker, 2005 ; Kim, 2010 ). Some specific style constructs have not been explicitly explained in relation to different academic disciplines. Therefore, demographic factors (i.e., age, gender, gender-role orientations, marital status, and socioeconomic status) are taken into consideration in the relationship with thinking styles among mainland postgraduate students in Hong Kong.

This study contributed to the advancement of research on both the influential role of demographic factors on thinking styles and the predictive roles of thinking styles for coping strategies. Theoretically, the present study can give insight to understand the relationships between these two constructs, respectively. Practically, the results of this study may provide implications for individual development in higher education by developing Type I thinking styles or adaptive coping strategies.

Coping Strategies and Three-Dimensional Coping Strategy Model

The conceptual framework of coping strategies was initially proposed by Folkman and Lazarus (1984) . They referred to coping strategies as reactions of individuals by changing cognitive and behavioral efforts to stress conditions related to potentially negative consequences ( Folkman and Lazarus, 1984 ). Lazarus argued that stress consists of three processes, and coping is the last process in the stress response ( Carver et al., 1989 ). Scholars generally categorized coping scales, such as problem-focused and emotional-focused coping ( Folkman and Lazarus, 1980 ), dual-process models ( Compas et al., 1997 ; Skinner, 1999 ), and hierarchical models of coping ( Ryan-Wenger, 1992 ). Despite the vague classification ( Skinner et al., 2003 ) and dysfunctional homogeneous ( Skinner et al., 2003 ) of some coping strategies, a three-dimensional coping strategy model ( Yuan et al., 2017 ) rather than Brief COPE (a short version of COPE, Carver, 1997 ) is proposed to examine coping strategies and divide them into three hierarchical types. The first category is self-directed coping, which is defined as an individual taking advantage of his/her behavioral and cognitive efforts in dealing with stress. This type includes active coping, positive reframing, and planning. The second category is other-directed coping, which is conceptualized as the preference of an individual for turning to others (people or things) for help when experiencing stress. This type pertains to venting, using emotional support, using of instrumental support, and self-distraction. The last category is relinquished control coping, which is characterized as the absence of an effort to deal with stressful situations ( Weisz et al., 1994 ). This type consists of social withdrawal, acceptance, and self-blame. In this model, self-directed coping is associated with the nature of adaptivity, and relinquished control coping is related to maladaptive values. However, there are some controversies over the value of other-directed coping. While a sample of 646 secondary students in China suggested that other-directed coping strategies are maladaptive ( Yuan et al., 2017 ), Carver et al. (1989) compared other-directed coping strategies as a double-edged sword. Specifically, the use of social-emotional support (one scale in other-directed coping strategies) can be adaptive when more support and encouragement fostering coping, nevertheless, it can also be maladaptive when it becomes a source of sympathy and a way to simply vent one's feelings ( Billings and Moos, 1984 ; Tolor and Fehon, 1987 ). What should be noted is that the use of adaptive coping or maladaptive coping can be influenced by the participants ( Roth and Cohen, 1986 ).

Three-Fold Model of Intellectual Styles and Thinking Styles

The term “style” was initially introduced to psychology by Allport (1937) . In the history of the field of styles, cognitive styles appeared earlier than other notions such as learning styles and thinking styles due to the necessity for the connection between cognition and personality, and the “cognitive-styles movement” proliferated in the late 1950s and flourished for more than two decades ( Adorno et al., 2019 ). However, the proliferation waned due to the plethora of existing style constructs and the resurgent interest of scholars in the discipline of education in the 1970s. In the mid-1980s, the field of styles began to arouse scholarly interest again because the theory of abilities and personality could not fully explain individual differences. However, lacking a conceptual framework ( Coffield et al., 2004 ) and with little understanding of the relationships between intellectual styles and other psychological constructs, the style field attempted to integrate various style constructs in the past four decades.

Four integrated models have been introduced: Curry's (1983) model, Miller's (1987) model, Grigorenko and Sternberg's (1995) model, and Zhang and Sternberg's (2005) three-fold model. The first two models have been widely criticized for being unable to provide sufficient construct reliability and validity ( Curry, 1983 ; Messick, 1994 ; Zhang and Sternberg, 2006 ). In Grigorenko and Sternberg's (1995) model of style traditions, the deficiency is that the theory may suffer from a lack of solid theoretical foundation, and overall measurement models are inconsistent with the theoretical models. Therefore, factor structures are not efficient to yield empirical evidence ( Ross, 1962 ; Keller and Holland, 1978 ; Joniak and Isaksen, 1988 ).

Considerable endeavors have been made by Zhang and Sternberg (2005) in integrating a variety of style constructs and conceptualizing the notion of the three-fold model of intellectual styles. The notion of intellectual styles, a term encompassing ten influential existing style constructs ( Zhang, 2017 ), is conceptualized as preferred ways of doing tasks or processing information ( Zhang and Sternberg, 2005 ). Zhang and Sternberg's (2005) three-fold model of intellectual styles has been proposed to resolve the three most controversial issues of intellectual styles (i.e., style value, style malleability, and style overlap) by presenting empirical evidence within a unified scientific framework and integrating all these style constructs into three types. Creativity-generating Type I intellectual styles represent low degrees of structure, cognitive complexity, autonomy, and norm-conforming. Type II intellectual styles denote high degrees of structure, cognitive simplicity, conformity, and authority. Type III intellectual styles are largely differentiated depending on situations, such as demands of a specific task and individual's level of interest in the task ( Zhang and Sternberg, 2005 , p. 36).

The nature of thinking styles should be clearly stated (i.e., style value, style malleability, and style overlapping). Concerning the style value, Zhang and Sternberg (2006) state that the majority of style constructs are value-laden rather than value-free. That is, Type I intellectual styles are generally superior to Type II intellectual styles since Type I are generally linked to more adaptive attributes ( Zhang, 2004 ; Zhang and Jing, 2014 ) and more desirable developmental outcomes ( Broberg and Moran, 1988 ; Guisande et al., 2007 ). In addition, Type III intellectual styles are neither good nor bad. Concerning style malleability, style constructs are fluid states instead of fixed traits. Although some style constructs may be relatively stable, they still can be malleable over a longer period of time. Concerning the last issue, while various style constructs empirically overlap, they still keep their uniqueness.

The theory of mental self-government ( Sternberg, 1988 , 1997 ) is the most updated and general model in Zhang and Sternberg's (2005) three-fold model of intellectual styles. Metaphorically, Sternberg (1988) compared multiple ways people managed their own activities to a variety of ways the government adopted to manage society. These various methods are thinking styles (also called the theory of mental self-government), which refer to the preferred and comfortable ways that people self-govern or deal with tasks ( Sternberg, 1988 , 1997 ). He suggested 13 thinking styles falling along five dimensions, those being functions, forms, levels, scopes, and leanings. In the three-fold model, these 13 styles were further operationalized into three types: Type I (e.g., the legislative, judicial, global, hierarchical, and liberal styles), Type II (e.g., the executive, local, monarchic, and conservative styles), and Type III (e.g., the oligarchic, anarchic, internal, and external styles) thinking styles.

The validity of Sternberg's theory of mental self-government has been frequently operationalized by the Thinking Styles Inventory Revised II (TSI-R2, Sternberg et al., 2007 ), which was the updated version of the TSI-R ( Sternberg et al., 2003 ) to further improve the internal consistency for the anarchic style. This updated inventory has been practiced extensively in many studies in several cultures, including the United States (e.g., Bishop and Foster, 2011 ), South Africa (e.g., Murphy and Janeke, 2009 ), Turkey (e.g., Fer, 2007 ), China (e.g., Zhang, 2010 ), and the United Kingdom ( Zhang and Higgins, 2008 ). The empirical evidence of thinking styles focuses on the influential factors (i.e., the personal factors and environmental factors) on thinking styles and the role of thinking styles in other attributes. However, the relationships between coping strategies and thinking styles and the relationships between demographic factors and thinking styles have not been sufficiently explored.

Demographic Factors and Their Relationships With Thinking Styles

One of the natures of thinking styles is style malleability, which is defined as whether styles can be malleable or modified due to outside forces or remain static over time ( Armor and Taylor, 2003 ). Zhang (2017) demonstrated that intellectual styles that include thinking styles can be modified or malleable by socialization. Since the socialization effects of demographics, such as age, gender, and gender-role orientation ( Carlson and Levy, 1968 ; Hofstede, 1980 ), have been much discussed and indicated in previous literature, the relationships between thinking styles and demographic factors are needed to be considered in the present research.

Empirical evidence on age difference in thinking styles is inconsistent ( Zhang and He, 2011 ; Al-Thani et al., 2014 ; Kuan and Zhang, 2020 ). These inconsistent findings can be partially accounted for by cultural differences, teaching methods ( Lau, 2014 ), instructional modes ( Fan, 2012 ), or interactional effects of age and gender in the role of thinking styles. Besides, the changeability of intellectual styles might be repeated and bidirectional over different periods of durations. For example, based on the data collected from Kuan and Zhang (2020) , the authors found that older participants are positively associated with Type II thinking styles (e.g., higher executive styles) in secondary schools. Furthermore, data gathered from a sample of university students, Zhang and He (2011) revealed that older students tended to score significantly higher in the frequency of using Type I thinking styles. Similarly, this phenomenon has also been found in other constructs (e.g., field dependence/independence) of the family of intellectual styles. Since young adulthood (aged from 17 to 24) might be a division of the development of field dependence/independence ( Zhang, 2013 ), the higher extent of field independence might be linked to the increase of age before young adulthood. Conversely, the higher extent of field dependence is related to older people after young adulthood. The division between traditional-aged and non-traditional-aged postgraduate students overlaps with young adulthood, there is a need to consider the age difference in thinking styles in the present study.

Inconsistent findings are also yielded over whether gender difference influences thinking styles ( Witkin and Berry, 1975 ; Balkis and Isiker, 2005 ; Gridley, 2006 ). In previous studies, a general pattern of gender difference in thinking styles is that men tended to score higher on the majority of Type I thinking styles and women scored higher on most of the Type II thinking styles ( Zhang and Sternberg, 2006 ). This phenomenon can be accounted for by the effect of gender-role orientation ( Balkis and Isiker, 2005 ; Zhang and Sternberg, 2006 ). Traditionally, the stereotypical view is that men should be the dominant ones who make rules and big decisions in the family and focus on the bigger picture. On the other hand, women should be obedient, follow rules, make minor decisions, and paycareful attention to details. Besides, women tended to score higher on the hierarchical style because if they are in pursuit of success, they need to fulfill multiple roles within their family and work ( Pinker, 1997 ). Thus, the gender difference in thinking styles may be partly due to social factors, such as different social expectations ( Stuart et al., 1965 ; Vaught, 1965 ), gender-role stereotypes ( Nash, 1979 ), and attitudes ( Maccoby and Jacklin, 1974 ; Huston, 1985 ).

Previous findings revealed no significant gender difference in thinking styles ( Grigorenko and Sternberg, 1997 ; Gridley, 2006 ). Nevertheless, gender differences exist in thinking styles. This phenomenon can also be accounted for by social-role orientation. As aforementioned, men and women are brought up with different social expectations, which may lead to different preferences for thinking styles. Nevertheless, some women who are raised and have past experiences more similar to a typical male socialization experience might possess a masculine self-concept ( Bem and Lenney, 1976 ). For example, in intellectual styles (e.g., perceptual styles), stereotypically masculine individuals were more field independent than those who were more stereotypically feminine ( Zhang, 2013 ). However, few previous studies simultaneously consider both social role orientations and their gender in relationships with thinking styles.

Studies on the marital status among postgraduate students mostly focus on married female candidates, marital satisfaction ( Powers et al., 2004 ), and mental health. To be specific, those studies specifically focused on their career ambition, social adjustment strain, perceived stress, social support, motivations, self-efficacy, self-esteem, and well-being ( Poyrazli and Kavanaugh, 2006 ; Fan, 2016 ). While these factors are associated with thinking styles, marital status needs to be considered in thinking styles among postgraduate students.

Socioeconomic status has been investigated in the field of postgraduate study, such as metacognitive awareness ( Jain et al., 2018 ), self-efficacy ( Han et al., 2014 ), and occupational aspiration ( Watson et al., 2010 ). Socioeconomic status can be considered as one of the factors influencing thinking styles. For example, higher socioeconomic status is associated with specific creativity-generating Type I thinking styles ( Grigorenko and Sternberg, 1995 ; Zhang and Postiglione, 2001 ). One explanation is that children from upper/middle socioeconomic status cognitively develop due to the stimuli they receive within their family environments ( Alevriadou et al., 2004 ). Zhang and Sternberg (2006) further explained that students from higher socioeconomic families have more chances to be challenged by different, unpredictable situations. By overcoming these challenges, they can be more creative and form a higher form of complexity. Thus, it is necessary to take socioeconomic status into account when considering the relationship with thinking styles among postgraduate students.

Different academic disciplines possess unique identities, which might lead to different thinking styles ( Becher, 1981 ). To elaborate, according to the nature of different disciplines, the ways of supervising and training postgraduate students can be varied due to some factors, such as small-group discussions ( Ho, 2011 ), educational experiences, and tacit knowledge ( Zarshenas et al., 2014 ).

Vice versa, the influence of thinking styles can also be perceived in varying academic disciplines. While students of different thinking styles may choose different disciplines, the difference in thinking styles might still exist since those who find themselves incompatible with the learning environment would withdraw from the program and adapt to new environments ( Witkin and Berry, 1975 ). This invisible shifting population can be seen as a piece of underlying evidence for the relationships between disciplines and thinking styles. Thus, different thinking styles in different disciplines can be seen as a result of the nature of different disciplines ( Pettigrew and King, 1993 ), different abilities, and required objectives, which might push learners in a certain direction.

Studies focusing on the differences between thinking styles and specific academic disciplines of students yielded the following findings ( Lam, 2000 ; Balkis and Isiker, 2005 ; Kim, 2010 ). Students of natural science prefer the global (I), executive (II), and internal (III) styles. And students of social science tend to deal with tasks with the liberal (I), conservative (II), monarchic (II), and external (III) styles. Finally, students of humanities prefer conservative (II), internal (III), and oligarchic styles (III). However, according to students of social science, their preference for the liberal style found by Kim (2010) is contradicted by the conservative style contended by Balkis and Isiker (2005) . Furthermore, some style constructs, such as the legislative (I), judicial (I), hierarchical (I), anarchic (III), and local (II) styles have not been explicitly explained concerning students of different academic disciplines. In the present study, social science, natural science, and humanities as the general classification of disciplines to examine the relationships between different academic disciplines and thinking styles among postgraduate students.

Coping Strategies and Their Relationships With Thinking Styles

Conceptually, thinking styles are the preferred ways of dealing with tasks ( Sternberg, 1988 ), and coping strategies are referred to as the preferred ways of coping with stress ( McCrae, 1982 ). In terms of the issue of value, both thinking styles and coping strategies are also value-laden or value-differentiated rather than value-free ( Zhang and Sternberg, 2005 ). Empirically, inconsistent findings are yielded from the relationships between intellectual styles and coping strategies. Appelhans and Schmeck (2002) suggested that Type I intellectual styles (e.g., deep-thinking learning strategies) are related to adaptive stress-coping strategies, and Type II intellectual styles (e.g., memorization learning strategy) are associated with maladaptive avoidance coping. On the other hand, Young (2005) contends that Type II intellectual styles (e.g., impulsivity) are associated with both adaptive (e.g., the confrontative strategy) and maladaptive coping strategies (e.g., the escape-avoidance strategy). Similarly, Gras et al. (2009) also found that Type I intellectual styles (e.g., innovation-seeking thinking style) are linked to both adaptive (e.g., the confrontative strategy and the planful problem-solving strategy) and maladaptive coping strategies (e.g., the escape-avoidance strategy). Relationships between Type III and coping strategies are also revealed in the previous literature. The external style is related to adaptive coping strategies, and the internal style is associated with maladaptive coping strategies ( Gras et al., 2009 ). Therefore, it is worthwhile to further explore the heuristic value of intellectual styles to coping strategies among postgraduate students in Hong Kong.

The Present Study

This study examined the influential roles of demographic factors (e.g., age, gender, social role orientation, marital status, and academic disciplines) in thinking styles and the predictive role of thinking styles for coping strategies with the control of demographic factors among mainland postgraduate students. This study is significant because it can enrich empirical knowledge of both relationships of the two aforementioned constructs, respectively. In addition, this study is also helpful to help postgraduate students to deal with coping strategies by advantage of thinking styles and their demographic factors.

To have a comprehensive understanding of the predictive power of thinking styles for coping strategies, all 13 thinking styles were examined in the present study. Coping strategies were categorized into three types as indicated in the literature review. The relationships were hypothesized as listed:

Hypotheses 1: It was predicted that most non-traditional-aged, men, masculine, married participants with higher socioeconomic status would tend to show Type I thinking styles, and the majority of traditional-aged, women, feminine, unmarried participants with lower socioeconomic status would exhibit Type II thinking styles.

Hypotheses 2: Students of natural science would prefer the global (I), executive (II) and, internal (III) styles, and students of social sciences would tend to deal with tasks with the monarchic (II) and external (III) styles. Finally, students of humanities would prefer conservative (II), internal (III), and oligarchic styles (III). No hypotheses were made on liberal, conservative, legislative, judicial, hierarchical, anarchic, and local styles.

Hypotheses 3: It was predicted that the thinking styles of participants would be associated with coping strategies. To be specific, Type I thinking styles would be positively linked to adaptive self-directed coping strategies, while Type II thinking styles would be positively associated with maladaptive other-directed coping and relinquished control coping strategies. At the same time, Type I and Type II thinking styles would be positively related to other-directed coping strategies. Type III thinking styles would be related to all coping strategies.

Participants

A total of 148 postgraduate students (112 women and 36 men) were recruited from a university in Hong Kong. This study was based on a simple random sampling approach for conscious and unbiased purposes ( Kirk, 2011 ). The ages of participants ranged from 22 to 42 years, with the mean and the median age being 30 years. Of the participants, 86 (58.1%) were traditional-aged and 62 (41.9%) were non-traditional-aged. Ethical clearance was endorsed by the Human Research Ethics Committee before collecting data. Before the questionnaires, participants were required to complete consent forms, which informed that their participation was entirely voluntary, and they had the right to withdraw from the research without any negative consequences at any time. Among the participants, 35.9% ( N = 53) were in natural sciences, 39.9% ( N = 59) in social sciences, and 24.3% ( N = 36) in arts and humanities. Of the participants, 83.1% ( N = 123) were unmarried, and the rest of the participants were married. Concerning their socioeconomic status, 22.3% ( N = 33) of postgraduate students were in low, 53.4% ( N = 79) in middle, and 24.3% ( N = 36) in high socioeconomic status. In terms of the gender-role orientations of participants, 3.4% ( N = 5) were masculine, 9.5% ( N = 14) were feminine, 85.5% ( N = 127) were androgynous, and 1.4% ( N = 2) were undifferentiated. Personal reports were given in appreciation for their participation. The detailed distribution of the sample is presented in Table 1 .

Table 1 . The detailed distribution of the sample.

Participants responded to the aforementioned demographic information, TSI-R2 ( Sternberg et al., 2007 ), and COPE Revised ( Yuan et al., 2017 ).

Thinking Styles

The TSI-R2 ( Sternberg et al., 2007 ), on the basis of Sternberg's theory of mental self-government, is employed to measure the thinking styles of the participants. It is a non-timed self-report questionnaire of 65 statements in five groups, and each subscale of thinking styles is assessed by five statements ( Sternberg et al., 2007 ). Respondents complete the questionnaire and rate themselves on a 7-point Likert scale, with “1” representing that the statement does not describe themselves at all, and “7” showing that the statements describe themselves very well ( Zhang et al., 2006 ). The origin version of the TSI-R2 is in English, and a translated and back-translated traditional Chinese version ( Zhang, 2004 ) was used in this study since the majority of participants were mainland postgraduate students. The TSI-R2 ( Sternberg et al., 2007 ) is the updated version of the TSI-R ( Sternberg et al., 2003 ), which is used to further improve the internal consistency for the anarchic style. In this version of the anarchic style, the Cronbach's alpha coefficients for TSI-R2 indicate satisfactory internal reliability above 0.60 ( Nunnally, 1978 ), and the internal reliability of all the other thinking styles range from 0.63 to 0.86.

COPE Revised

Coping strategies are measured by the COPE Revised ( Yuan et al., 2017 ), which is a short version derived from Carver's Brief COPE (1997) for the sake of both brevity and sound psychometric properties. The Brief COPE ( Carver, 1997 ), a short version of COPE ( Carver et al., 1989 ), aims at assessing thirteen types of coping strategies ( Skinner et al., 2003 ) and has been widely applied in multiple settings. Generally, the Brief COPE is a sound psychometric measurement since the Cronbach's alpha coefficients for most scales indicate satisfactory internal reliabilities above 0.60 ( Nunnally, 1978 ). Nevertheless, low internal consistency has also been found in previous studies ( Doron et al., 2011 ). At the same time, factor analysis also revealed the fragments of subscales. Thus, the Brief COPE ( Carver, 1997 ) sacrifices satisfactory psychometric properties for brevity. To keep a balance of both psychometric properties and brevity, the COPE Revised, also called the three-dimensional coping strategy model ( Yuan et al., 2017 ), is developed to assess coping strategies, which is composed of 45 items with 15 three-item subscales and adopt Seven-point Likert scale with “1” indicating the least frequent employment of the strategy in the statement and “7” showing the most prevalent employment of the strategy in the statement. Cronbach's alpha coefficients of the COPE Revised are ranging from 0.82 to 0.83 after the modification, and the validity has also been tested by exploratory factor analysis and confirmatory factor analysis ( Yuan et al., 2017 ).

Data Analysis

Firstly, reliabilities of TSI-R2 ( Sternberg et al., 2007 ) and COPE Revised ( Yuan et al., 2017 ) were examined. The internal reliability of these two inventories was estimated by Cronbach's alpha (1951 ). Secondly, multivariate ANOVA (MANOVA) was conducted to statistically examine the influence of demographic factors (i.e., age, gender, social-role orientation, socioeconomic status, marital status, and academic disciplines) on thinking styles. Finally, hierarchical multiple regression analyses with the stepwise method were also be utilized to statistically explore the predictive power of thinking styles in coping strategies beyond the influence of demographic factors.

Internal Scale Reliability of TSI-R2 and COPE Revised

The Cronbach's alpha coefficients for the TSI-R2 scales were 0.71 (legislative), 0.63 (executive), 0.76 (judicial), 0.73 (global), 0.73 (local), 0.84 (liberal), 0.75 (conservative), 0.72 (hierarchical), 0.72 (monarchic), 0.75 (oligarchic), 0.66 (anarchic), 0.79 (internal), and 0.78 (external). These figures are consistent with those obtained in previous studies among secondary school students and university students in Hong Kong and mainland China ( Zhang et al., 2013 ; Yuan et al., 2017 ). The reliability was reasonably good for TSI-R2.

The COPE Revised ( Yuan et al., 2017 ) exhibited acceptable reliability with all scales exceeding 0.50 ( Nunnally, 1978 ) and, the majority of scales (except for active coping and venting) were in their mid 0.70s. The three-dimensional hierarchical model ( Yuan et al., 2017 ) also exhibited good Cronbach alpha coefficients, and they were 0.86, 0.87, and 0.79 for the self-directed dimension, the other-directed dimension and the relinquished control dimension separately. Correlations among key variables and statistics from hierarchical multiple regressions are presented in Tables 2 and 3 .

Table 2 . Influential roles of demographic factors on thinking styles.

Table 3 . Predicting coping strategies from thinking styles.

Influential Roles of Demographic Factors on Thinking Styles

Firstly, findings from the MANOVA showed that male participants were perceived to behave more preference for internal styles than female participants (mean male = 5.08, mean female = 4.66, t = 2.15, p < 0.05). Secondly, undifferentiated participants scored the highest in judicial (mean masculinity = 4.04, mean femininity = 4.49, mean androgyny = 5.05, mean undifferentiation = 5.30, p < 0.05), and liberal (mean masculinity = 3.72, mean femininity = 3.47, mean androgyny = 4.58, mean undifferentiation = 4.70, p = 0.001) styles. Also, androgynous participants tended to perform internal styles (mean masculinity = 5.00, mean femininity = 4.01, mean androgyny = 4.83, mean undifferentiation = 4.80, p < 0.05) more in dealing with tasks than other three types of participants. Thirdly, traditional-aged participants exhibited more local (mean traditional−aged = 4.24, mean nontraditional−aged = 3.87, t = 2.05, p < 0.05), less hierarchical (mean traditional−aged = 5.14, mean nontraditional−aged = 5.53, t = −2.82, p < 0.01), and more anarchic styles (mean traditional−aged = 4.08, mean nontraditional−aged = 3.74, t = 1.98, p = 0.05) to deal with tasks than non-traditional-aged participants.

Results from the t -test showed that unmarried participants had less preference for using the monarchic style (mean unmarried = 4.86, mean married = 5.38, t = −2.36, p < 0.05) and the oligarchic style (mean unmarried = 4.60, mean married = 5.06, t = −2.09, p < 0.05). No statistical differences have been found in the relationships between academic disciplines and thinking styles and the relationships between socioeconomic status and thinking styles.

Predicting Coping Strategies From Thinking Styles With Demographic Factors Controlled

With relevant demographic factors being taken into consideration, results from hierarchical multiple regressions indicated that 10 thinking styles significantly contributed to all 10 coping strategies. These unique contributions of thinking styles to coping strategies ranged from 7 to 35%. From the statistical perspective, all contributions are in the expected directions. First, two Type I (liberal and hierarchical) and two Type II styles (external and anarchic) accounted for 34.9 % of the observed variance in self-directed coping strategies. The contribution of two Type I styles and one Type III style (external) was positive, while that of the anarchic style was negative. Second, one Type I style (hierarchical), two Type II styles (local and conservative), and two Type III styles (anarchic and internal) accounted for 34.2% of the observed variance in relinquished control coping strategies. Two Type II styles (local and conservative) and two Type III styles (anarchic and internal) were significantly positively predicted, whereas one Type I style (hierarchical) was significantly negatively predicted. Third, two Type I styles (legislative and hierarchical), one Type II style (executive), and three Type III styles (oligarchic, anarchic, and external) accounted for 7.9% of the observed variance in other-directed coping strategies. The contribution of two Type I styles (legislative and hierarchical), one Type II style (executive), and two Type III styles (anarchic and external) positively predicted other-directed coping strategies, whereas one Type II style (oligarchic) both positively predicted one other-directed coping strategy (self-distraction) and negatively predicted another other-directed coping strategy (instrumental support). Hence, as was anticipated based on the theoretical framework and empirical evidence, Type I styles (liberal and hierarchical) significantly positively predicted self-directed coping strategies, and Type II styles (local and conservative) significantly positively predicted relinquished control strategies.

The first primary objective concerned the influential roles of demographic factors on thinking styles. In the beginning, two inventories were validated among mainland postgraduate students in Hong Kong. Results demonstrated that non-traditional-aged participants exhibited less local, more hierarchical, and less anarchic styles to deal with tasks than traditional-aged participants, which are consistent with the hypotheses. Compared to traditional-aged participants, non-traditional-aged participants tended to have more working experiences, in which they were exposed to more complicated multi-task environments with various challenges and difficulties. Thus, they have to nurture a higher level of cognitive complexity, such as dealing with tasks in an orderly way or making decisions globally to cope with their work efficiently. Thus, it is understandable that non-traditional-aged postgraduate students have more preferences for Type I thinking styles. This finding can lend support to previous studies ( Zhang and He, 2011 ; Kuan and Zhang, 2020 ).

Gender difference has no significant influence on Type I and Type II thinking styles. The findings are contradicted the hypotheses and previous studies among Hong Kong university students, Hong Kong secondary students, and mainland Chinese secondary students ( Zhang and Sachs, 1997 ; Cheung, 2002 ; Zhang, 2003 ). Previous studies showed that men were generally associated with Type I thinking styles, and women were frequently related to Type II thinking styles. The discrepancy could be partially accounted for by different social expectations and different methods of nurture. However, the insignificant effects of gender on thinking styles could also be confounded by the function of socialization, such as their educational experiences in the period of postgraduate studies. Postgraduate students need to tackle multiple tasks. Thus, they have to sufficiently finish different tasks in an orderly way. If male or female postgraduate students want to get high grades, they need to show critical and innovative ideas in their assignments. These ideas encourage students to promote Type I thinking styles. Thus, no gender difference could be seen as a result of the socialization of postgraduate students' learning requirements or learning objectives. Another explanation is that the standard of admission to the master's programs is related to Type I thinking styles. That is to say, the majority of students who are able to get admitted into postgraduate studies already possess Type I thinking styles, thus no significant gender difference in the relationship of thinking styles could be perceived in the current study. Moreover, the present study found that one Type III thinking style (internal) was positively associated with male postgraduate students. This suggests that male postgraduate students tend to work alone on a task and make decisions relying on their own judgment.

No previous literature has reviewed the relationship between gender-role orientation and thinking styles. As shown in the results section, undifferentiated participants scored the highest in the judicial and the liberal style. The positive effect of undifferentiation on Type I thinking styles was surprising and has not yet been found in previous studies. It may be because previous hypotheses only consider masculinity and the femininity regardless of undifferentiation and androgyny as key variables of gender-role orientations to examine the relationship with thinking styles ( Bem and Lenney, 1976 ; Zhang, 2013 ). More surprisingly, undifferentiation is always considered to be associated with poorer socialization, limited behavioral flexibility ( Bem, 1974 ), low self-esteem ( Chow, 1987 ), and little cognitive complexity in evaluating careers ( Harren, 1979 ). However, in the present study, undifferentiation was positively linked to superior Type I thinking styles. Thus, the function of undifferentiation is needs to be delved into in further research. Besides, the result showed that androgynous participants also tended to perform internal styles more in dealing with tasks than the other three types of participants. This means that androgynous participants prefer to work alone and make their own decisions based on their judgment.

The finding showed that unmarried participants have less preference for using monarchic and oligarchic styles, which was also contradicted the hypotheses. If married participants continue to further improve themselves in postgraduate study, they may decrease the time available to spend with their family to a certain extent. Thus, under invisible economic and psychological pressure, this kind of participant could probably spend most of their energy on their academic work to graduate on time. Therefore, married participants were associated with the monarchic thinking style. Furthermore, those postgraduate students who have got married may tend to consider their families before making decisions. Thus, married postgraduate students prefer to possess the oligarchic style.

Results showed that neither academic disciplines nor socioeconomic status have a significant influence on thinking styles. This finding was also surprising and contradictary to previous findings. This may be explained by the small sample size in the present research. Another explanation can also be accounted for the requirements of admission and learning objectives. As aforementioned, those who possess Type I thinking styles might be more likely to get admitted into postgraduate studies regardless of their academic disciplines and socioeconomic status. Furthermore, the learning requirements encompassing all academic disciplines may push students to promote their Type I thinking styles (the legislative, judicial, liberal, and global styles).

The second objective concerned the predictive roles of thinking styles for coping strategies. Results demonstrated that Type I thinking styles positively contributed to self-directed coping strategies and Type II thinking styles positively played the predictive roles for relinquished control coping strategies, supporting the hypothesis of this study. Despite the maximum variance in coping strategies explained by thinking styles being about 35% among participants, the predictive roles of thinking styles for coping strategies are more likely to reflect true variations rather than have been found by chance, for three reasons. First, the general pattern is that students with Type I thinking styles prefer to utilize self-directed coping strategies, and students with Type II thinking styles tend to employ relinquished control coping strategies. Given stressors and challenges students experience in universities, students are more likely to consider assigning and dealing with priorities in a novel and orderly way. Hence, they would be more efficient and comfortable in developing different solutions, making plans, and giving priorities to the significant stressors. Similarly, when facing stress and difficulties, students of Type II thinking styles might accept the stress negatively, blame themselves, and stay away from their friends and family. Type II thinking style (executive) was also found to be positively associated with other-directed coping (the use of instrumental support). It is natural for students who get used to following specific rules or directions tend to get advice from experienced people.

Second, the use of other-directed coping strategies is in association with the preference of both Type I and Type II thinking styles. When confronting stressful situations, students with Type I thinking styles have a preference for using their own strategies and ideas to relieve their stress by self-dependent activities such as going to movies, reading, sleeping, or listening to music to distract their attention. It is natural that students with the executive style (one Type II style) would prefer to ask for and execute suggestions when dealing with stressors. Third, the relationships that predictive roles of Type III thinking styles in all three types of coping strategies make substantial sense. A preference for the anarchic style was negatively associated with self-directed coping strategies and positively related to relinquished control coping strategies. It could be interpreted that students who tended to tackle different stressors affecting them with equal urgency ended up feeling helpless and desperat trying to handle all the stressors at once and thus were more likely to eventually give up (relinquished control coping strategies). While the external style was positively associated with self-directed and other-directed coping, the internal style was positively associated with the relinquished control coping strategies. If students attempted to share their stress situations with friends or classmates they thus might have more opportunities to collect more information on how to deal with that stress, or receive suggestions from their friends.

Contributions, Implications, and Limitations

This study has made three contributions. Firstly, two inventories [i.e., TSI-R2 ( Sternberg et al., 2007 ) and COPE Revised ( Yuan et al., 2017 )] have been validated in the context of Hong Kong. Secondly, the present study showed that thinking styles have a unique predictive power in coping strategies. Furthermore, it also pioneered the relationships between thinking styles and gender-role orientations, which depicts a more dynamic picture of the relationships between thinking styles and key demographic variables. Thirdly, empirical evidence has been provided to support the theory of Zhang and Sternberg's intellectual styles ( Zhang and Sternberg, 2005 ) and other theories. For example, the research showed the predictive roles of thinking styles in coping strategies, which supports the argument of the value of intellectual styles. Furthermore, findings of the present research lend support to the gender-role orientation by providing empirical evidence on the discussion of the function of androgyny to thinking styles.

Significant implications provide insight into educational and psychological practice. The finding has proved the value of thinking styles by examining the relationship with coping strategies. In other words, Type I thinking styles have been identified as adaptive thinking styles, which provides valuable information for postgraduate students, academics, and administrators in higher institutional backgrounds. According to the findings in the present research, creativity-generating Type I thinking styles are more likely to help postgraduate students to utilize adaptive coping strategies (self-directed coping strategies). Norm-conforming Type II thinking styles seem to be related to the maladaptive coping strategies (relinquished control coping strategies). In other words, Type I thinking styles are more beneficial for student development. Bearing this in mind is of significance in psychological and educational settings. For postgraduate students, they can search for opportunities to cultivate Type I thinking styles in both their academic performance and their daily lives. For example, when handling multiple tasks with great pressure, postgraduate students are advised to think of their own innovative ideas or creative strategies to analyze and deal with stressful situations. For academics aiming at promoting Type I thinking styles, academics should give students the maximum freedom to invent their own ideas and share their ideas with other students, which provide opportunities to inspire others. For administrators, they should arrange their curriculums considering innovative and critical thinking as their standards of assessment.

Although we foresee significant contributions by this research, three main limitations should be pointed out. Firstly, data in the quantitative research elucidated self-reported inventories require retrospection, which might influence objectiveness. Secondly, the population of the sample is not large enough and only is conducted in the Hong Kong context, which might not be over-generalized to represent other student populations in other areas. Thirdly, participants might withdraw from the search due to the long period of time required to finish the questionnaire, which might influence the specific demographic factors or disciplines representing the particular populations.

Data Availability Statement

The raw data supporting the conclusions of this article will be made available by the authors, without undue reservation.

Ethics Statement

The studies involving human participants were reviewed and approved by the Human Research Ethics Committee, HKU. Written informed consent for participation was not required for this study in accordance with the national legislation and the institutional requirements.

Author Contributions

SC contributed to conception and design of the study, organized the database, performed the statistical analysis, wrote the first draft of the manuscript, wrote sections of the manuscript, manuscript revision, read, and approved the submitted version.

Conflict of Interest

The author declares that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Publisher's Note

All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article, or claim that may be made by its manufacturer, is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.

Supplementary Material

The Supplementary Material for this article can be found online at: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.693637/full#supplementary-material

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Keywords: thinking styles, coping strategies, gender role orientations, postgraduate students, Hong Kong

Citation: Chen S (2022) Predictive Roles of Thinking Styles in Coping Strategies Among Mainland Postgraduate Students in Hong Kong. Front. Psychol. 12:693637. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2021.693637

Received: 11 April 2021; Accepted: 01 December 2021; Published: 28 January 2022.

Reviewed by:

Copyright © 2022 Chen. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY) . The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

*Correspondence: Siyao Chen, ciyochan@hotmail.com

Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.

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Research in Neuroscience

p-ISSN: 2326-1226 e-ISSN: 2326-1234

2013; 2(1): 1-10

doi:10.5923/j.neuroscience.20130201.01

Learning and Thinking Styles Based on Whole Brain Theory in Relation to Sensory-Motor Integration

Ahmad Mohamed Awad Al Ghraibeh , Abdullah Ahmed Al-Zahrani

Department of Psychology , College of Education, King Saud University, Riyadh 1451, PO Box 2458, Saudi Arabia

Email:

The study aims to explore learning and thinking styles based on Whole Brain Theory; and their relationship with sensory-motor integration. It also explores the correlations between variables. Two tests were used to explore the correlations between the two variables (learning and thinking styles based on Whole Brain Theory test and sensory-motor integration test). Tests were administered to discover whether the variables differ according to gender and age groups. Validity and reliability of the tests were insured. The study was conducted based on a stratified random (cluster) sample of (753) male and female students. The participants are (12-16) years old, enrolled in 13 public schools (7 male and 6 female schools) at Irbid first directorate. The study reveals significant correlations between both (Q_D 1 ) and (Q_C 2 ) with sensory-motor integration test due to gender differences in favour of females.

Keywords: Hemispheres, Brain, Sensory-Motor Integration, Learning and Thinking Styles

Cite this paper: Ahmad Mohamed Awad Al Ghraibeh, Abdullah Ahmed Al-Zahrani, Learning and Thinking Styles Based on Whole Brain Theory in Relation to Sensory-Motor Integration, Research in Neuroscience , Vol. 2 No. 1, 2013, pp. 1-10. doi: 10.5923/j.neuroscience.20130201.01.

Article Outline

1. introduction, 1.1. statement of the problem, 1.2. significance of the study, 1.3. definitions of terms, 1.4. variables of the study, 1.5. limitation of the study, 2.1. participants.

this table presents the sample distribution by gender and age group

2.2. Validity and Reliability

2.3. validity and reliability, 2.4. procedures of the study, 2.5. statistical analysis, 2.6. results.

Linear correlation coefficients between sensory motor integration test and learning and thinking styles based on whole-brain theory

difference of coefficients of both sensory motor integration test and learning styles based on whole-brain theory in terms of gender variable

V correlation statistical differences between sensory motor integration tests with learning style based on whole-brain theory according age group

2.7. Discussion

3. conclusions and recommendations.

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Cognitive Distortions: 22 Examples & Worksheets (& PDF)

Cognitive Distortions: When Your Brain Lies to You

Generally, this is a good thing—our brain has been wired to alert us to danger, attract us to potential mates, and find solutions to the problems we encounter every day.

However, there are some occasions when you may want to second guess what your brain is telling you. It’s not that your brain is purposely lying to you, it’s just that it may have developed some faulty or non-helpful connections over time.

It can be surprisingly easy to create faulty connections in the brain. Our brains are predisposed to making connections between thoughts, ideas, actions, and consequences, whether they are truly connected or not.

This tendency to make connections where there is no true relationship is the basis of a common problem when it comes to interpreting research: the assumption that because two variables are correlated, one causes or leads to the other. The refrain “correlation does not equal causation!” is a familiar one to any student of psychology or the social sciences.

It is all too easy to view a coincidence or a complicated relationship and make false or overly simplistic assumptions in research—just as it is easy to connect two events or thoughts that occur around the same time when there are no real ties between them.

There are many terms for this kind of mistake in social science research, complete with academic jargon and overly complicated phrasing. In the context of our thoughts and beliefs, these mistakes are referred to as “cognitive distortions.”

Before you continue, we thought you might like to download our three Positive CBT Exercises for free. These science-based exercises will provide you with a detailed insight into Positive CBT and will give you additional tools to address cognitive distortions in your therapy or coaching.

This Article Contains:

What are cognitive distortions, experts in cognitive distortions: aaron beck and david burns, a list of the most common cognitive distortions, changing your thinking: examples of techniques to combat cognitive distortions, a take-home message.

Cognitive distortions are biased perspectives we take on ourselves and the world around us. They are irrational thoughts and beliefs that we unknowingly reinforce over time.

These patterns and systems of thought are often subtle–it’s difficult to recognize them when they are a regular feature of your day-to-day thoughts. That is why they can be so damaging since it’s hard to change what you don’t recognize as something that needs to change!

Cognitive distortions come in many forms (which we’ll cover later in this piece), but they all have some things in common.

All cognitive distortions are:

Tendencies or patterns of thinking or believing;
That are false or inaccurate;
And have the potential to cause psychological damage.

It can be scary to admit that you may fall prey to distorted thinking. You might be thinking, “There’s no way I am holding on to any blatantly false beliefs!” While most people don’t suffer in their daily lives from these kinds of cognitive distortions, it seems that no one can completely escape these distortions.

If you’re human, you have likely fallen for a few of the numerous cognitive distortions at one time or another. The difference between those who occasionally stumble into a cognitive distortion and those who struggle with them on a more long-term basis is the ability to identify and modify or correct these faulty patterns of thinking.

As with many skills and abilities in life, some are far better at this than others–but with practice, you can improve your ability to recognize and respond to these distortions.

These distortions have been shown to relate positively to symptoms of depression, meaning that where cognitive distortions abound, symptoms of depression are likely to occur as well (Burns, Shaw, & Croker, 1987).

In the words of the renowned psychiatrist and researcher David Burns:

“I suspect you will find that a great many of your negative feelings are in fact based on such thinking errors.”

Errors in thinking, or cognitive distortions, are particularly effective at provoking or exacerbating symptoms of depression. It is still a bit ambiguous as to whether these distortions cause depression or depression brings out these distortions (after all, correlation does not equal causation!) but it is clear that they frequently go hand-in-hand.

Much of the knowledge around cognitive distortions come from research by two experts: Aaron Beck and David Burns. Both are prominent in the fields of psychiatry and psychotherapy.

If you dig any deeper into cognitive distortions and their role in depression, anxiety, and other mental health issues, you will find two names over and over again: Aaron Beck and David Burns.

These two psychologists literally wrote the book(s) on depression, cognitive distortions, and the treatment of these problems.

Aaron Beck began his career at Yale Medical School, where he graduated in 1946 (GoodTherapy, 2015). His required rotations in psychiatry during his residency ignited his passion for research on depression, suicide, and effective treatment.

In 1954, he joined the University of Pennsylvania’s Department of Psychiatry, where he still holds the position of Professor Emeritus of Psychiatry.

In addition to his prodigious catalog of publications, Beck founded the Beck Initiative to teach therapists how to conduct cognitive therapy with their patients–an endeavor that has helped cognitive therapy grow into the therapy juggernaut that it is today.

Beck also applied his knowledge as a member or consultant for the National Institute of Mental Health, an editor for several peer-reviewed journals, and lectures and visiting professorships at various academic institutions throughout the world (GoodTherapy, 2015).

While there are clearly many honors, awards, and achievements Beck may be known for, perhaps his greatest contribution to the field of psychology is his role in the development of cognitive therapy.

Beck developed the basis for Cognitive Behavioral Therapy , or CBT, when he noticed that many of his patients struggling with depression were operating on false assumptions and distorted thinking (GoodTherapy, 2015). He connected these distorted thinking patterns with his patients’ symptoms and hypothesized that changing their thinking could change their symptoms.

This is the foundation of CBT – the idea that our thought patterns and deeply held beliefs about ourselves and the world around us drive our experiences. This can lead to mental health disorders when they are distorted but can be modified or changed to eliminate troublesome symptoms.

In line with his general research focus, Beck also developed two important scales that are among some of the most used scales in psychology: the Beck Depression Inventory and the Beck Hopelessness Scale. These scales are used to evaluate symptoms of depression and risk of suicide and are still applied decades after their original development (GoodTherapy, 2015).

David Burns

Another big name in depression and treatment research, Dr. David Burns, also spent some time learning and developing his skills at the University of Pennsylvania – it seems that UPenn is particularly good at producing future leaders in psychology!

Burns graduated from Stanford University School of Medicine and moved on to the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, where he completed his psychiatry residency and cemented his interest in the treatment of mental health disorders (Feeling Good, n.d.).

He is currently serving as a Professor Emeritus of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the Stanford University School of Medicine, in addition to continuing his research on treating depression and training therapists to conduct effective psychotherapy sessions (Feeling Good, n.d.). Much of his work is based on Beck’s research revealing the potential impacts of distorted thinking and suggesting ways to correct this thinking.

He is perhaps most well known outside of strictly academic circles for his worldwide best-selling book Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy . This book has sold more than 4 million copies within the United States alone and is often recommended by therapists to their patients struggling with depression (Summit for Clinical Excellence, n.d.).

This book outlines Burns’ approach to treating depression, which mostly focuses on identifying, correcting, and replacing distorted systems and patterns of thinking. If you are interested in learning more about this book, you can find it on Amazon with over 1,400 reviews to help you evaluate its effectiveness.

To hear more about Burns’ work in the treatment of depression, check out his TED talk on the subject below.

As Burns discusses in the above video, his studies of depression have also influenced the studies around joy and self-esteem.

The most researched form of psychotherapy right now is covered by his book, Feeling Good , aimed at providing tools to the general public.

There are many others who have picked up the torch for this research, often with their own take on cognitive distortions. As such, there are numerous cognitive distortions floating around in the literature, but we’ll limit this list to the most common sixteen.

The first eleven distortions come straight from Burns’ Feeling Good Handbook (1989).

1. All-or-Nothing Thinking / Polarized Thinking

Also known as “Black-and-White Thinking,” this distortion manifests as an inability or unwillingness to see shades of gray. In other words, you see things in terms of extremes – something is either fantastic or awful, you believe you are either perfect or a total failure.

2. Overgeneralization

This sneaky distortion takes one instance or example and generalizes it to an overall pattern. For example, a student may receive a C on one test and conclude that she is stupid and a failure. Overgeneralizing can lead to overly negative thoughts about yourself and your environment based on only one or two experiences.

3. Mental Filter

Similar to overgeneralization, the mental filter distortion focuses on a single negative piece of information and excludes all the positive ones. An example of this distortion is one partner in a romantic relationship dwelling on a single negative comment made by the other partner and viewing the relationship as hopelessly lost, while ignoring the years of positive comments and experiences.

The mental filter can foster a decidedly pessimistic view of everything around you by focusing only on the negative.

4. Disqualifying the Positive

On the flip side, the “Disqualifying the Positive” distortion acknowledges positive experiences but rejects them instead of embracing them.

For example, a person who receives a positive review at work might reject the idea that they are a competent employee and attribute the positive review to political correctness, or to their boss simply not wanting to talk about their employee’s performance problems.

This is an especially malignant distortion since it can facilitate the continuation of negative thought patterns even in the face of strong evidence to the contrary.

5. Jumping to Conclusions – Mind Reading

This “Jumping to Conclusions” distortion manifests as the inaccurate belief that we know what another person is thinking. Of course, it is possible to have an idea of what other people are thinking, but this distortion refers to the negative interpretations that we jump to.

Seeing a stranger with an unpleasant expression and jumping to the conclusion that they are thinking something negative about you is an example of this distortion.

6. Jumping to Conclusions – Fortune Telling

A sister distortion to mind reading, fortune telling refers to the tendency to make conclusions and predictions based on little to no evidence and holding them as gospel truth.

One example of fortune-telling is a young, single woman predicting that she will never find love or have a committed and happy relationship based only on the fact that she has not found it yet. There is simply no way for her to know how her life will turn out, but she sees this prediction as fact rather than one of several possible outcomes.

7. Magnification (Catastrophizing) or Minimization

Also known as the “Binocular Trick” for its stealthy skewing of your perspective, this distortion involves exaggerating or minimizing the meaning, importance, or likelihood of things.

An athlete who is generally a good player but makes a mistake may magnify the importance of that mistake and believe that he is a terrible teammate, while an athlete who wins a coveted award in her sport may minimize the importance of the award and continue believing that she is only a mediocre player.

8. Emotional Reasoning

This may be one of the most surprising distortions to many readers, and it is also one of the most important to identify and address. The logic behind this distortion is not surprising to most people; rather, it is the realization that virtually all of us have bought into this distortion at one time or another.

Emotional reasoning refers to the acceptance of one’s emotions as fact. It can be described as “ I feel it, therefore it must be true .” Just because we feel something doesn’t mean it is true; for example, we may become jealous and think our partner has feelings for someone else, but that doesn’t make it true. Of course, we know it isn’t reasonable to take our feelings as fact, but it is a common distortion nonetheless.

Relevant: What is Emotional Intelligence? + 18 Ways to Improve It

9. Should Statements

Another particularly damaging distortion is the tendency to make “should” statements. Should statements are statements that you make to yourself about what you “should” do, what you “ought” to do, or what you “must” do. They can also be applied to others, imposing a set of expectations that will likely not be met.

When we hang on too tightly to our “should” statements about ourselves, the result is often guilt that we cannot live up to them. When we cling to our “should” statements about others, we are generally disappointed by their failure to meet our expectations, leading to anger and resentment.

10. Labeling and Mislabeling

These tendencies are basically extreme forms of overgeneralization, in which we assign judgments of value to ourselves or to others based on one instance or experience.

For example, a student who labels herself as “an utter fool” for failing an assignment is engaging in this distortion, as is the waiter who labels a customer “a grumpy old miser” if he fails to thank the waiter for bringing his food. Mislabeling refers to the application of highly emotional, loaded, and inaccurate or unreasonable language when labeling.

11. Personalization

As the name implies, this distortion involves taking everything personally or assigning blame to yourself without any logical reason to believe you are to blame.

This distortion covers a wide range of situations, from assuming you are the reason a friend did not enjoy the girls’ night out, to the more severe examples of believing that you are the cause for every instance of moodiness or irritation in those around you.

In addition to these basic cognitive distortions, Beck and Burns have mentioned a few others (Beck, 1976; Burns, 1980):

12. Control Fallacies

A control fallacy manifests as one of two beliefs: (1) that we have no control over our lives and are helpless victims of fate, or (2) that we are in complete control of ourselves and our surroundings, giving us responsibility for the feelings of those around us. Both beliefs are damaging, and both are equally inaccurate.

No one is in complete control of what happens to them, and no one has absolutely no control over their situation. Even in extreme situations where an individual seemingly has no choice in what they do or where they go, they still have a certain amount of control over how they approach their situation mentally.

13. Fallacy of Fairness

While we would all probably prefer to operate in a world that is fair, the assumption of an inherently fair world is not based in reality and can foster negative feelings when we are faced with proof of life’s unfairness.

A person who judges every experience by its perceived fairness has fallen for this fallacy, and will likely feel anger, resentment, and hopelessness when they inevitably encounter a situation that is not fair.

14. Fallacy of Change

Another ‘fallacy’ distortion involves expecting others to change if we pressure or encourage them enough. This distortion is usually accompanied by a belief that our happiness and success rests on other people, leading us to believe that forcing those around us to change is the only way to get what we want.

A man who thinks “If I just encourage my wife to stop doing the things that irritate me, I can be a better husband and a happier person” is exhibiting the fallacy of change.

15. Always Being Right

Perfectionists and those struggling with Imposter Syndrome will recognize this distortion – it is the belief that we must always be right. For those struggling with this distortion, the idea that we could be wrong is absolutely unacceptable, and we will fight to the metaphorical death to prove that we are right.

For example, the internet commenters who spend hours arguing with each other over an opinion or political issue far beyond the point where reasonable individuals would conclude that they should “agree to disagree” are engaging in the “Always Being Right” distortion. To them, it is not simply a matter of a difference of opinion, it is an intellectual battle that must be won at all costs.

16. Heaven’s Reward Fallacy

This distortion is a popular one, and it’s easy to see myriad examples of this fallacy playing out on big and small screens across the world. The “Heaven’s Reward Fallacy” manifests as a belief that one’s struggles, one’s suffering, and one’s hard work will result in a just reward.

It is obvious why this type of thinking is a distortion – how many examples can you think of, just within the realm of your personal acquaintances, where hard work and sacrifice did not pay off?

Sometimes no matter how hard we work or how much we sacrifice, we will not achieve what we hope to achieve. To think otherwise is a potentially damaging pattern of thought that can result in disappointment, frustration, anger, and even depression when the awaited reward does not materialize.

These distortions in our thinking are often subtle, and it is challenging to recognize them when they are a regular feature of our day-to-day thoughts. Importantly also, these distortions have been shown to relate positively to symptoms of depression, meaning that where cognitive distortions abound, symptoms of depression are likely to occur (Burns et al., 1987).

But, all is not lost. Identifying and being mindful of when we engage in these distorted thoughts can be really helpful. Ways to tackle this may be by keeping a thought log, checking whether these thoughts are facts or just the opinions of ourselves or others or, even putting our thoughts on trial and actively trying to challenge them.

Attempting to recognize and challenge our cognitive distortions can be difficult, but know that we aren’t alone in this experience. Shedding a gentle awareness onto our thoughts can be a great first step.

These distortions, while common and potentially extremely damaging, are not something we must simply resign ourselves to living with.

Beck, Burns, and other researchers in this area have developed numerous ways to identify, challenge, minimize, or erase these distortions from our thinking.

Some of the most effective and evidence-based techniques and resources are listed below.

Cognitive Distortions Handout

Since you must first identify the distortions you struggle with before you can effectively challenge them, this resource is a must-have.

The Cognitive Distortions handout lists and describes several types of cognitive distortions to help you figure out which ones you might be dealing with.

The distortions listed include:

All-or-Nothing Thinking;
Overgeneralizing;
Discounting the Positive;
Jumping to Conclusions;
Mind Reading;
Fortune Telling;
Magnification (Catastrophizing) and Minimizing;
Emotional Reasoning;
Should Statements;
Labeling and Mislabeling;
Personalization.

The descriptions are accompanied by helpful descriptions and a couple of examples.

This information can be found in the Increasing Awareness of Cognitive Distortions exercise in the Positive Psychology Toolkit© .

World’s Largest Positive Psychology Resource

The Positive Psychology Toolkit© is a groundbreaking practitioner resource containing over 500 science-based exercises , activities, interventions, questionnaires, and assessments created by experts using the latest positive psychology research.

Updated monthly. 100% Science-based.

“The best positive psychology resource out there!” — Emiliya Zhivotovskaya , Flourishing Center CEO

Automatic Thought Record

This worksheet is an excellent tool for identifying and understanding your cognitive distortions. Our automatic, negative thoughts are often related to a distortion that we may or may not realize we have. Completing this exercise can help you to figure out where you are making inaccurate assumptions or jumping to false conclusions.

The worksheet is split into six columns:

Automatic Thoughts (ATs)
Your Response
A More Adaptive Response

First, you note the date and time of the thought.

In the second column, you will write down the situation. Ask yourself:

What led to this event?
What caused the unpleasant feelings I am experiencing?

The third component of the worksheet directs you to write down the negative automatic thought, including any images or feelings that accompanied the thought. You will consider the thoughts and images that went through your mind, write them down, and determine how much you believed these thoughts.

After you have identified the thought, the worksheet instructs you to note the emotions that ran through your mind along with the thoughts and images identified. Ask yourself what emotions you felt at the time and how intense the emotions were on a scale from 1 (barely felt it) to 10 (completely overwhelming).

Next, you have an opportunity to come up with an adaptive response to those thoughts. This is where the real work happens, where you identify the distortions that are cropping up and challenge them.

Ask yourself these questions:

Which cognitive distortions were you employing?
What is the evidence that the automatic thought(s) is true, and what evidence is there that it is not true?
You’ve thought about the worst that can happen, but what’s the best that could happen? What’s the most realistic scenario?
How likely are the best-case and most realistic scenarios?

Finally, you will consider the outcome of this event. Think about how much you believe the automatic thought now that you’ve come up with an adaptive response, and rate your belief. Determine what emotion(s) you are feeling now and at what intensity you are experiencing them.

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These detailed, science-based exercises will equip you or your clients with tools to find new pathways to reduce suffering and more effectively cope with life stressors.

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Decatastrophizing

This is a particularly good tool for talking yourself out of catastrophizing a situation.

The worksheet begins with a description of cognitive distortions in general and catastrophizing in particular; catastrophizing is when you distort the importance or meaning of a problem to be much worse than it is, or you assume that the worst possible scenario is going to come to pass. It’s a reinforcing distortion, as you get more and more anxious the more you think about it, but there are ways to combat it.

First, write down your worry. Identify the issue you are catastrophizing by answering the question, “What are you worried about?”

Once you have articulated the issue that is worrying you, you can move on to thinking about how this issue will turn out.

Think about how terrible it would be if the catastrophe actually came to pass. What is the worst-case scenario? Consider whether a similar event has occurred in your past and, if so, how often it occurred. With the frequency of this catastrophe in mind, make an educated guess of how likely the worst-case scenario is to happen.

After this, think about what is most likely to happen–not the best possible outcome, not the worst possible outcome, but the most likely. Consider this scenario in detail and write it down. Note how likely you think this scenario is to happen as well.

Next, think about your chances of surviving in one piece. How likely is it that you’ll be okay one week from now if your fear comes true? How likely is it that you’ll be okay in one month? How about one year? For all three, write down “Yes” if you think you’d be okay and “No” if you don’t think you’d be okay.

Finally, come back to the present and think about how you feel right now. Are you still just as worried, or did the exercise help you think a little more realistically? Write down how you’re feeling about it.

This worksheet can be an excellent resource for anyone who is worrying excessively about a potentially negative event.

You can download the Decatastrophizing Worksheet here.

Cataloging Your Inner Rules

Cognitive distortions include assumptions and rules that we hold dearly or have decided we must live by. Sometimes these rules or assumptions help us to stick to our values or our moral code, but often they can limit and frustrate us.

This exercise can help you to think more critically about an assumption or rule that may be harmful.

First, think about a recent scenario where you felt bad about your thoughts or behavior afterward. Write down a description of the scenario and the infraction (what you did to break the rule).

Next, based on your infraction, identify the rule or assumption that was broken. What are the parameters of the rule? How does it compel you to think or act?

Once you have described the rule or assumption, think about where it came from. Consider when you acquired this rule, how you learned about it, and what was happening in your life that encouraged you to adopt it. What makes you think it’s a good rule to have?

Now that you have outlined a definition of the rule or assumption and its origins and impact on your life, you can move on to comparing its advantages and disadvantages. Every rule or assumption we follow will likely have both advantages and disadvantages.

The presence of one advantage does not mean the rule or assumption is necessarily a good one, just as the presence of one disadvantage does not automatically make the rule or assumption a bad one. This is where you must think critically about how the rule or assumption helps and/or hurts you.

Finally, you have an opportunity to think about everything you have listed and decide to either accept the rule as it is, throw it out entirely and create a new one, or modify it into a rule that would suit you better. This may be a small change or a big modification.

If you decide to change the rule or assumption, the new version should maximize the advantages of the rule, minimize or limit the disadvantages, or both. Write down this new and improved rule and consider how you can put it into practice in your daily life.

You can download the Cataloging Your Inner Rules Worksheet.

Facts or Opinions?

This is one of the first lessons that participants in cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) learn – that facts are not opinions. As obvious as this seems, it can be difficult to remember and adhere to this fact in your day to day life.

This exercise can help you learn the difference between fact and opinion, and prepare you to distinguish between your own opinions and facts.

The worksheet lists the following fifteen statements and asks the reader to decide whether they are fact or opinion:

I am a failure.
I’m uglier than him/her.
I said “no” to a friend in need.
A friend in need said “no” to me.
I suck at everything.
I yelled at my partner.
I can’t do anything right.
He said some hurtful things to me.
She didn’t care about hurting me.
This will be an absolute disaster.
I’m a bad person.
I said things I regret.
I’m shorter than him.
I am not loveable.
I’m selfish and uncaring.
Everyone is a way better person than I am.
Nobody could ever love me.
I am overweight for my height.
I ruined the evening.
I failed my exam.

Practicing making this distinction between fact and opinion can improve your ability to quickly differentiate between the two when they pop up in your own thoughts.

Here is the Facts or Opinions Worksheet .

In case you’re wondering which is which, here is the key:

I am a failure. False
I’m uglier than him/her. False
I said “no” to a friend in need. True
A friend in need said “no” to me. True
I suck at everything. False
I yelled at my partner. True
I can’t do anything right. False
He said some hurtful things to me. True
She didn’t care about hurting me. False
This will be an absolute disaster. False
I’m a bad person. False
I said things I regret. True
I’m shorter than him. True
I am not loveable. False
I’m selfish and uncaring. False
Everyone is a way better person than I am. False
Nobody could ever love me. False
I am overweight for my height. True
I ruined the evening. False
I failed my exam. True

Putting Thoughts on Trial

This exercise uses CBT theory and techniques to help you examine your irrational thoughts. You will act as the defense attorney, prosecutor, and judge all at once, providing evidence for and against the irrational thought and evaluating the merit of the thought based on this evidence.

The worksheet begins with an explanation of the exercise and a description of the roles you will be playing.

The first box to be completed is “The Thought.” This is where you write down the irrational thought that is being put on trial.

Next, you fill out “The Defense” box with evidence that corroborates or supports the thought. Once you have listed all of the defense’s evidence, do the same for “The Prosecution” box. Write down all of the evidence calling the thought into question or instilling doubt in its accuracy.

When you have listed all of the evidence you can think of, both for and against the thought, evaluate the evidence and write down the results of your evaluation in “The Judge’s Verdict” box.

This worksheet is a fun and engaging way to think critically about your negative or irrational thoughts and make good decisions about which thoughts to modify and which to embrace.

Click here to see this worksheet for yourself (TherapistAid).

17 Science-Based Ways To Apply Positive CBT

These 17 Positive CBT & Cognitive Therapy Exercises [PDF] include our top-rated, ready-made templates for helping others develop more helpful thoughts and behaviors in response to challenges, while broadening the scope of traditional CBT.

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Hopefully, this piece has given you a good understanding of cognitive distortions. These sneaky, inaccurate patterns of thinking and believing are common, but their potential impact should not be underestimated.

Even if you are not struggling with depression, anxiety, or another serious mental health issue, it doesn’t hurt to evaluate your own thoughts every now and then. The sooner you catch a cognitive distortion and mount a defense against it, the less likely it is to make a negative impact on your life.

What is your experience with cognitive distortions? Which ones do you struggle with? Do you think we missed any important ones? How have you tackled them, whether in CBT or on your own?

Let us know in the comments below. We love hearing from you.

We hope you enjoyed reading this article. For more information, don’t forget to download our three Positive CBT Exercises for free .

Beck, A. T. (1976). Cognitive therapies and emotional disorders . New York, NY: New American Library. https://www.amazon.com/dp/0452009286/
Burns, D. D. (1980). Feeling good: The new mood therapy. New York, NY: New American Library. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00RWSFOHC/
Burns, D. D. (1989). The feeling good handbook. New York, NY: Morrow. https://www.amazon.com/dp/0452261740/
Burns, D. D., Shaw, B. F., & Croker, W. (1987). Thinking styles and coping strategies of depressed women: An empirical investigation. Behaviour Research and Therapy, 25, 223-225. https://doi.org/10.1016/0005-7967(87)90049-0
Feeling Good. (n.d.). About. Feeling Good. Retrieved from https://feelinggood.com/about/
GoodTherapy. (2015). Aaron Beck. GoodTherapy LLC. Retrieved from https://www.goodtherapy.org/famous-psychologists/aaron-beck.html
Summit for Clinical Excellence. (n.d.). David Burns, MD. Summit for clinical excellence faculty page. Retrieved from https://summitforclinicalexcellence.com/partners/faculty/david-burns/
TherapistAid. (n.d.). Cognitive restructuring: Thoughts on trial. Retrieved from https://www.therapistaid.com/worksheets/putting-thoughts-on-trial.pdf

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What our readers think.

Hi, thank you very much for above article on cognitive biases. I bumped on it as I searched about how deceptive thoughts can be. I definitely struggle with a few of those biases like black and white thinking, perfectionism, catastrophizing and always be right. This resource is such a big help to me. I have learnt to approach situations more objectively and be aware of thoughts that creep in to try and keep me from taking action or cause me to take certain action. Thankyou

Wow! Very interesting! 😀 I wish you all the best <3

Hello, I enjoyed the article. my only complaint is that we should focus on grammatical correctness. Him/Her is very bad grammar we have them and they which reads as much more adult

thank you for your valuable input! We are very much aware of it and have already implemented this in the newer articles, but we definitely still need to adapt the grammatical correctness in older content.

Warm regards, Julia | Community Manager

Grammar indeed. They/them is the plural form for he/she and him/her. Without any political pseudo-scientific marxist-leninist based imperialisme of a minority. Language follows its own rules. Let it be as it always has been. As a rose is a rose. And a cow is a cow.

Grammatical correctness and political correctness are quite different. It seems you referring to the latter.

It’s really helpful. I’m myself struggling with anxiety and I get to know that there are so many cognitive distortions I’ve encountered with .Thank you so much .And I hope that I came out of this phase as soon as possible .

Great article, thanks for sharing these valuable information and exercises

Great article! Was a good PDF to read!

Hi, from where I can download a questionnaire that will help to understand what is their thinking style?

Thanks for your question, I’d love to help! Could you clarify exactly which questionnaire you mean?

If you are referring to the Increasing Awareness of Cognitive Distortions exercise, you must subscribe to our PositivePsychology.com Toolkit© to gain access.

Let me know if I understood your request clearly 🙂

Kind regards, -Caroline | Community Manager

Hi Caroline, i have a problem with catastrophizing thinking error, i do imagine and magnify some things with no reason how can i prevent that

Hi Patrick,

It’s wonderful to see your self-awareness, as recognizing the issue is the vital first step towards resolution!

We are pleased to offer you two complimentary resources designed to assist you in addressing catastrophizing thought patterns: (1) the “ Challenging Catastrophic Thinking ” worksheet, and (2) the “ Decatastrophizing ” worksheet.

We’re truly hoping these tools are helpful. Just remember, it’s one step at a time. You’ve got this! Kind regards, Julia | Community Manager

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Eur J Psychol
v.12(3); 2016 Aug

Cognitive Distortions, Humor Styles, and Depression

Katerina rnic.

a Department of Psychology, The University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario, Canada

David J. A. Dozois

Rod a. martin.

Cognitive distortions are negative biases in thinking that are theorized to represent vulnerability factors for depression and dysphoria. Despite the emphasis placed on cognitive distortions in the context of cognitive behavioural theory and practice, a paucity of research has examined the mechanisms through which they impact depressive symptomatology. Both adaptive and maladaptive styles of humor represent coping strategies that may mediate the relation between cognitive distortions and depressive symptoms. The current study examined the correlations between the frequency and impact of cognitive distortions across both social and achievement-related contexts and types of humor. Cognitive distortions were associated with reduced use of adaptive Affiliative and Self-Enhancing humor styles and increased use of maladaptive Aggressive and Self-Defeating humor. Reduced use of Self-Enhancing humor mediated the relationship between most types of cognitive distortions and depressed mood, indicating that distorted negative thinking may interfere with an individual’s ability to adopt a humorous and cheerful outlook on life (i.e., use Self-Enhancing humor) as a way of regulating emotions and coping with stress, thereby resulting in elevated depressive symptoms. Similarly, Self-Defeating humor mediated the association of the social impact of cognitive distortions with depression, such that this humor style may be used as a coping strategy for dealing with distorted thinking that ultimately backfires and results in increased dysphoria.

Cognitive distortions are negatively biased errors in thinking that are purported to increase vulnerability to depression ( Dozois & Beck, 2008 ). Individuals experience automatic thoughts in response to events, which in turn lead to emotional and behavioral responses. The content of automatic thoughts is typically consistent with an individual’s core beliefs about important aspects of themselves, others, and the world. When negative core beliefs are activated and negative automatic thoughts elicited (comprised of errors in reasoning that are not evidence-based) a negative, neutral or even positive event may influence negative affect and maladaptive behaviours. Overtime, this sequence among thoughts, emotions and behaviours can cause or maintain symptoms of depression.

Cognitive distortions were first listed and described by Beck, Rush, Shaw, and Emery (1979) . Burns (1980) subsequently expanded on their list and identified 10 common depressotypic thinking errors. These include mindreading (i.e., assuming that others are thinking negatively about oneself), catastrophizing (i.e., making negative predictions about the future based on little or no evidence), all-or-nothing-thinking (i.e., viewing something as either-or, without considering the full spectrum and range of possible evaluations), emotional reasoning (i.e., believing something to be true based on emotional responses rather than objective evidence), labeling (i.e., classifying oneself negatively after the occurrence of an adverse event), mental filtering (i.e., focusing on negative information and devaluing positive information), overgeneralization (i.e., assuming that the occurrence of one negative event means that additional bad things will happen), personalization (i.e., assuming that one is the cause of a negative event), should statements (i.e., thinking that things must or should be a certain way), and minimizing or disqualifying the positive (i.e., ignoring or dismissing positive things that have happened). Cognitive errors may occur with differing frequency across social and achievement domains, particularly depending on the content of an individual’s core beliefs, which typically fall into two categories: unlovability/sociotropy/dependency, or helplessness/autonomy/achievement ( Beck, 1995 ; Beck, Epstein, Harrison, & Emery, 1983 ; Clark, Beck, & Alford, 1999 ). Given the importance of the interpersonal context for the onset and course of depression (see Evraire & Dozois, 2011 ; Hammen & Shih, 2014 ), cognitive distortions occurring in the social domain may be most relevant to depressive symptomatology.

Although cognitive distortions figure prominently in cognitive theory and therapy, a dearth of research has examined the mechanisms through which cognitive distortions impact subsequent psychological distress. Humor styles are potential mediators of the association between cognitive and interpersonal vulnerability factors and psychological dysfunction, distress, or poor interpersonal functioning (e.g., Cann, Norman, Welbourne, & Calhoun, 2008 ; Dozois, Martin, & Faulkner, 2013 ; Fitts, Sebby, & Zlokovich, 2009 ; Kazarian, Moghnie, & Martin, 2010 ; Kuiper & McHale, 2009 ). For example, past research has found that various humor styles mediated the relation of early maladaptive schemas (i.e., core beliefs about the self and others) and depressive symptoms ( Dozois, Martin, & Bieling, 2009 ).

Humor styles comprise the ways in which people use humor to cope and to communicate with others. Because humor involves incongruity and can be interpreted in multiple ways, it can be used to shift perspectives regarding a stressful situation and as a way to gain a sense of mastery. Past research has indicated that some humor styles accomplish this in a way that is beneficial (Affiliative and Self-Enhancing humor), whereas other styles are maladaptive (Aggressive and Self-Defeating humor; Martin, Puhlik-Doris, Larsen, Gray, & Weir, 2003 ; Kuiper, Grimshaw, Leite, & Kirsh, 2004 ). Affiliative humor is used to facilitate relationships, amuse others, and minimize social tension through the use of spontaneous jokes, witty banter, and funny anecdotes. Self-Enhancing humor involves a humorous and cheerful outlook in life and a tendency to be amused by incongruities that facilitates emotion regulation and coping with stress and adversity. This type of humor encompasses a style of thinking, and therefore can be conceptualized as a cognitive construct. Aggressive humor is used to posture in a relationship and to demean or manipulate others through the use of sarcasm, teasing, derision, and ridicule. This style of humor involves making disparaging comments and “putting down” others in an effort to enhance one’s self, but at the expense of relationship quality. Self-Defeating humor involves excessive self-disparagement as one says or does funny things at one’s own expense in order to gain approval, amuse others, or to avoid dealing with a problem. This type of humor is ingratiating and includes allowing oneself to be the “butt” of others’ jokes. This type of humor is associated with low self-esteem and is distinct from not taking oneself overly seriously and making light of one’s faults and errors in a self-accepting manner (which would comprise Affiliative humor).

The four styles of humor, as assessed by the Humor Styles Questionnaire ( Martin et al., 2003 ), are differentially correlated with emotional and psychosocial well-being (see Martin, 2007 , for review). Self-Enhancing humor is associated with emotional well-being, including self-esteem, optimism, and positive affect, and negatively associated with depression, anxiety, rumination, perceived stress, and neuroticism. Affiliative humor, in contrast, is more closely associated with relationship variables than with emotional well-being, and is related to intimacy, relationship satisfaction, social support, interpersonal competence, secure attachment, and extraversion. Affiliative humor is inversely related to loneliness and social anxiety. Likewise, Aggressive humor is predominantly associated with relationship variables, and is negatively related to satisfaction, competence, agreeableness, and conscientiousness, and positively associated with hostility and neuroticism. Self-Defeating humor is related to anxiety, depression, anxious attachment, and neuroticism, and negatively associated with self-esteem and optimism. Whereas Self-Enhancing and low Self-Defeating humor are related to emotional well-being, Affiliative and low Aggressive humor are more closely associated with interpersonal functioning.

The aim of the current study is to investigate how both beneficial and detrimental uses of humor influence depressive symptoms. Humor styles are considered to be coping strategies, which may be used to cope with the experience of activated beliefs and distorted thinking. Because cognitive distortions involve negatively biased thinking about self and others, it was hypothesized that individuals who experience cognitive distortions frequently and whose lives are impacted by them would tend to engage in maladaptive humor styles as these would be more congruent with automatic thoughts involving themes of incompetence, worthlessness, unlovability, and assumptions that others are perceiving and thinking negatively about them. Given that these themes are relevant to low self-esteem, which Self-Defeating, not Aggressive, humor is related to, cognitive distortions may be more robustly associated with a Self-Defeating humor style. A negatively distorted type of thinking is likely not conducive to the use of Affiliative and Self-Enhancing humor (particularly in social contexts where humor is more likely to play a role), which require a sense of playfulness, the generation of positive statements, and an intention to connect with others. Furthermore, given that low Self-Enhancing and high Self-Defeating humor have been found to be most closely associated with emotional distress, these variables were hypothesized to mediate the association of cognitive distortions (both frequency and impact) with depressive symptoms. Mediating models were also tested separately for frequency and impact of cognitive distortions in interpersonal and achievement contexts in an exploratory manner.

Participants

Participants were 208 first-year undergraduate psychology students at the University of Western Ontario, who were predominantly female (70% female, 30% male) and White (69% identified as White, 25% as Asian, 2% as Black, 1% as Hispanic, and 3% as ‘other’ or mixed race). The mean age of the sample was 18.46 ( SD = 1.73).

Cognitive Distortions Scale (CDS)

The CDS ( Covin, Dozois, Ogniewicz, & Seeds, 2011 ) is a 20-item self-report measure that assesses the frequency of 10 types of cognitive distortions (mindreading, catastrophizing, all-or-nothing thinking, emotional reasoning, labeling, mental filtering, overgeneralization, personalization, should statements, minimizing or disqualifying the positive) across both social and achievement related (e.g., school or work) situations. Participants are presented with a definition of the distortion (referred to in the questionnaire as a ‘thinking type’ in order to reduce defensiveness) and provided with an example of that distortion in an interpersonal and achievement context. For example, for ‘should statements,’ the following definition is provided: “People sometimes think that things should or must be a certain way” and the example for interpersonal contexts is: “Anne believes that she must be funny and interesting when socializing.” Participants indicate the frequency with which they engage in the type of thinking on a 7-point Likert-type scale (1 = Never, 7 = All the time) in social and achievement situations. Total, social, and achievement scores are obtained by adding items. Past research has indicated that the CDS has good psychometric properties in undergraduate ( Covin, Dozois, Ogniewicz, & Seeds, 2011 ) and clinical samples ( Özdel, Taymur, Guriz, Tulaci, Kuru, & Turkcapar, 2014 ), including internal consistency, test-retest reliability over two weeks, and construct, discriminant, convergent, and divergent validity. In the current study, participants were also asked to rate the impact that cognitive distortions have in social and achievement contexts on a 7-point Likert-type scale (1 = Not at all, 7 = Totally). Internal consistency of each subscale was good (total frequency = .91, social frequency = .81, achievement frequency = .85, total impact = .92, social impact = .85, achievement impact = .86).

Humor Styles Questionnaire (HSQ)

The HSQ ( Martin et al., 2003 ) is a 32-item self-report measure that assess adaptive (Affiliative, Self-Enhancing) and maladaptive (Aggressive, Self-Defeating) styles of humor. Sample items are: “I laugh and joke a lot with my closest friends” (Affiliative humor); “Even when I’m by myself, I’m often amused by the absurdities of life” (Self-Enhancing humor); “If someone makes a mistake, I will often tease them about it” (Aggressive humor); and “I will often get carried away in putting myself down if it makes my family or friends laugh” (Self-defeating humor). Respondents rate items by indicating the extent to which they agree with statements on a 7-point Likert-type scale (1= totally disagree; 7 = totally agree). Higher scores indicate that a particular humor style is descriptive of the participant. Past research has demonstrated good reliability and validity of subscales ( Martin 2007 ; Martin et al., 2003 ), including internal consistency, test-retest reliability over one week, and construct, criterion, discriminant, and convergent validity, as well as a stable factor structure. In the current study, the internal consistency (Cronbach’s alpha) of each of the subscales was good (Affiliative = .81, Self-Enhancing = .82, Aggressive = .68, Self-Defeating = .75).

Beck Depression Inventory-II (BDI-II)

The BDI-II ( Beck, Steer, & Brown, 1996 ) is a 21-item instrument that assesses the presence and severity of unipolar depressive symptoms. Individuals rate each statement on a 0 to 3 scale according to how well it describes how they have felt over the past two weeks. A sample item is “Sadness: 0 = I do not feel sad; 1 = I feel sad much of the time; 2 = I am sad all the time; 3 = I am so sad or unhappy that I can’t stand it.” Total scores are yielded by summing items, with higher scores indicating greater depressive symptoms. The BDI-II has been widely used with adult and undergraduate samples and is recognized for its strong psychometric properties, including internal consistency, test-retest reliability over several months, content, construct, criterion, convergent, and divergent validity (e.g., Dozois, Dobson, & Ahnberg, 1998 ; see Dozois & Covin, 2004 , for a review). In the current study, internal consistency was excellent (Cronbach’s alpha = .92).

Participants completed measures during group testing sessions. Participants completed the CDS, HSQ, and BDI-II, as well as additional measures as part of a larger study, in randomized order. Participants were then debriefed about the nature of the study and compensated with course credit.

Statistical Analyses

Mediation analyses were conducted to test the hypothesis that humor styles mediate the relationship between cognitive distortions and depressive symptoms. Simple correlations between the predictor variables (cognitive distortions), mediator variables (humor styles) and the criterion variable (depressive symptoms) were first examined (see Table 1 ). A prerequisite for mediation is that all correlations between a predictor and mediator, mediator and criterion, and predictor and criterion for a given analysis be significant ( Baron & Kenny, 1986 ). Mediation analyses were conducted only for the cognitive distortions and corresponding mediators that met this requirement. To test for the potential mediating effects of humor styles, the bootstrap sampling procedure developed by Preacher and Hayes (2008) was used. This procedure examines and tests the direct effect of the predictor variable on the criterion variable and the indirect (i.e., mediating) effect through the pathway of the mediator variable. The bootstrap procedure uses sampling with replacement to draw a large number of samples (1,000 in the present study) from the data set, and path coefficients are calculated for each sample. Using estimates based on the 1,000 samples, the mean direct and indirect effects and their confidence intervals (CIs) are computed. These CIs are used to determine whether or not an effect is statistically significant. For each effect, the corresponding Bias Corrected 95% or 99% CI was examined; if the range did not cross zero, the effect was considered significant at the .05 or .01 level, respectively. An advantage of the bootstrap-driven approach is that it does not assume a normal distribution of variables, unlike product-of-coefficient approaches such as the Sobel test.

Scale	BDI-II	HSQ-Affiliative Humor	HSQ-Self-Enhancing Humor	HSQ-Aggressive Humor	HSQ-Self-Defeating Humor
CDS-Frequency	.35***	-.16*	-.16*	.17*	.31***
CDS-Social Frequency	.33***	-.17*	-.20*	.17*	.39***
CDS-Achievement Frequency	.31***	-.13	-.10*	.14	.29***
CDS-Impact	.31***	-.20*	-.22**	.03	.23**
CDS-Social Impact	.31***	-.19*	-.25**	.04	.21**
CDS-Achievement Impact	.27**	-.18*	-.16*	.03	.22**
HSQ-Affiliative Humor	-.11
HSQ-Self-Enhancing Humor	-.23**
HSQ-Aggressive Humor	.18**
HSQ-Self-Defeating Humor	.28***

Note. BDI-II = Beck Depression Inventory-II; CDS = Cognitive Distortions Scale; HSQ = Humor Styles Questionnaire.

* p < .05. ** p < .01. *** p < .001.

All mediation analyses were conducted using the macro provided by Preacher and Hayes (2008) for conducting the bootstrap procedure. Note that in the figures and tables presented, path coefficients and corresponding p -values are based on mediation analyses without bootstrapping, since the bootstrapping procedure only provides Bias Corrected CIs in the output. Because the bootstrapping procedure provides a more robust analysis, the evaluations of significance in the analyses below are based on bootstrapping. All variables in the analysis were standardized ( M = 0, SD = 1.0), to allow for a comparison of results across analyses. Path coefficients can therefore be interpreted in a manner similar to correlation coefficients.

The means and standard deviations for the six CDS subscales, the four HSQ subscales, and the BDI-II are presented in Table 2 for descriptive purposes. Pearson correlations between the CDS scales, HSQ scales, and BDI-II are presented in Table 1 . Cognitive Distortion Frequency was significantly negatively correlated with Affiliative and Self-Enhancing humor. This variable was also positively associated with Aggressive and Self-Defeating humor. The same pattern of correlations was found for Cognitive Distortion Social Frequency. Cognitive distortion Achievement Frequency was significantly and negatively related to Self-Enhancing humor, and positively correlated with Self-Defeating humor. Cognitive Distortion Impact was negatively correlated with Affiliative and Self-Enhancing humor, and positively correlated with Self-Defeating humor. The same pattern of correlations was found for Cognitive Distortion Social and Achievement Impact.

Variable
CDS-Frequency	81.00	18.16
CDS-Social Frequency	41.60	9.27
CDS-Achievement Frequency	39.41	10.21
CDS-Impact	80.96	19.15
CDS-Social Impact	41.82	9.97
CDS-Achievement Impact	39.14	10.60
HSQ-Affiliative Humor	47.63	6.39
HSQ-Self-Enhancing Humor	36.28	8.48
HSQ-Aggressive Humor	29.61	7.31
HSQ-Self-Defeating Humor	26.76	8.08
BDI-II	9.79	6.53

All scales of the CDS were significantly positively correlated with the BDI-II, consistent with the idea that cognitive distortions are vulnerability factors for dysphoria and depression. Furthermore, consistent with past research, the BDI-II was negatively correlated with Self-Enhancing humor, and positively associated and Self-Defeating humor. It was also positively related to Aggressive humor.

Multiple mediation analyses were conducted using the procedure described earlier to examine potential mediating effects of the humor styles on the relationships between each of the CDS subscales and the BDI-II. In the analysis using CDS Frequency as the predictor variable, HSQ Self-Enhancing, Aggressive, and Self-Defeating humor styles were included as potential mediators, as these were the only humor styles correlated with both CDS Frequency and BDI-II scores. Results of this analysis are presented in Figure 1 . A significant mediating effect was found for Self-Enhancing humor ( p < .05), but the mediating effects for Aggressive and Self-Defeating humor were not significant. Therefore, higher scores on CDS Frequency were associated with lower Self-Enhancing humor, which in turn predicted higher BDI-II scores. In addition to the indirect effect of CDS Frequency on dysphoria through Self-Enhancing humor, a direct effect was also found ( p < .01), indicating that Self-Enhancing humor only partially mediated this relationship.

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* p < .05. ** p < .01. *** p < .001. ns = Not statistically significant.

In the mediation analysis for CDS Social Frequency, HSQ Self-Enhancing, Aggressive, and Self-Defeating humor styles were again included as potential mediators as determined by the pattern of correlations found earlier. The results are shown in Figure 2 . In this analysis, and similar to the analysis for CDS Frequency, a significant mediating effect was found for Self-Enhancing humor ( p < .05), but the mediating effects for Aggressive and Self-Defeating humor were not significant. Therefore, higher scores on CDS Social Frequency were associated with lower Self-Enhancing humor, which in turn predicted higher BDI-II scores. Furthermore, in addition to the indirect effect of CDS Frequency on dysphoria through Self-Enhancing humor, a direct effect was also found ( p < .01), indicating that Self-Enhancing humor only partially mediated this relationship.

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In the analysis using CDS Achievement Frequency as the predictor variable, only HSQ Self-Enhancing and Self-Defeating humor styles were included as potential mediators based on the obtained pattern of correlations. The results are presented in Figure 3 . No significant mediating effects were found, however there was a direct effect of CDS Achievement Frequency on dysphoria ( p < .01).

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In the analysis using CDS Impact as the predictor, HSQ Self-Enhancing and Self-Defeating humor styles were included as potential mediators, see Figure 4 . A significant mediating effect was found for Self-Enhancing humor ( p < .05), and the mediating effect for Self-Defeating humor was nonsignificant. Higher scores on CDS Impact predicted lower Self-Enhancing humor, which in turn predicted higher BDI-II scores. The direct effect of CDS Impact on dysphoria was also significant, ( p < .01), indicating a partial mediating effect of Self-Enhancing humor.

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Figure 5 shows the results of the analysis for CDS Social Impact, in which we entered Self-Enhancing and Self-Defeating humor as potential mediators as determined by the pattern of simple correlations. In this analysis, significant mediating effects were found for both Self-Enhancing ( p < .05) and Self-Defeating humor ( p < .05). Higher scores on CDS Social impact predicted lower scores on Self-Enhancing and higher scores on Self-Defeating humor, which in turn predicted higher BDI-II scores. The direct effect of CDS Social Impact on dysphoria was significant ( p < .01), indicating that the humor styles were only partial mediators.

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Finally, in the analysis for CDS Achievement Impact, Self-Enhancing and Self-Defeating humor were entered as potential mediators. Only Self-Enhancing humor mediated the relation of CDS Achievement Impact with depressive symptoms ( p < .05). No mediating effect was found for Self-Defeating humor, see Figure 6 . Therefore, higher scores on CDS Achievement Impact predicted lower Self-Enhancing humor, which in turn predicted higher BDI-II scores. The direct effect of CDS Achievement Impact on dysphoria was also significant, ( p < .05), indicating that Self-Enhancing humor was only a partial mediator.

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The purpose of the current study was to examine the relationships among cognitive distortions, adaptive and maladaptive humor styles, and depressive symptoms. Another objective was to evaluate whether humor styles mediate the relationship between cognitive distortions and dysphoria. As predicted, the frequency and impact of cognitive distortions, as well as frequency and impact ratings of cognitive distortions in both interpersonal and achievement-related contexts, were positively and significantly associated with depressive symptomatology. This finding is consistent with cognitive theory, which posits that cognitive distortions are a form of automatic thoughts related to negative affect and depressed mood. This finding is also supportive of the practice of assessing and altering cognitive distortions as a treatment target in cognitive behavioral therapy for depressed individuals (see Clark, 2014 ).

Consistent with past research, self-reported depressive symptoms were negatively related to use of Self-Enhancing humor and positively associated with Self-Defeating humor. However, inconsistent with past research, dysphoria was not related to Affiliative humor in the present study, although pearson’s r was in in the expected direction (i.e., negative). Past research has found modest negative correlations of Affiliative humor with dysphoria ( Dozois et al., 2009 ; Frewen, Brinker, Martin, & Dozois, 2008 ) using an undergraduate sample that was similar in terms of age and gender distribution. However, the current sample exhibited a smaller mean and standard deviation in BDI-II scores. It is possible that the current sample lacked sufficient severity and variance in self-reported depressive symptoms to detect a true correlation between dysphoria and Affiliative humor. Moreover, Affiliative humor is both theoretically and empirically more pertinent to relational functioning than to emotional well-being ( Martin, 2007 ), so it is not entirely surprising that a significant relationship was not found in the current study. Additionally, and also in contrast with past research, the current study found that dysphoria was associated with an Aggressive humor style (e.g., Dozois et al., 2009 ; Frewen et al., 2008 ; see Martin, 2007 for review). This is consistent with the finding that depression is predictive of greater generation of interpersonal conflict (i.e., interpersonal stress generation; Hammen, 1991 ), such that some of this conflict may arise from the depressed individual’s use of Aggressive humor.

Consistent with hypotheses, cognitive distortions were inversely associated with beneficial styles of humor, and positively correlated with detrimental humor styles. Affiliative humor was significantly and negatively associated with all forms of cognitive distortions, with the exception of frequency of cognitive distortions in achievement situations, which was not associated with Affiliative humor. This is likely because achievement contexts are less relevant for efforts to affiliate with others. Affiliative humor is used to facilitate relationships and reduce tension, and involves a sense of playfulness and spontaneity. Negatively distorted thinking, in contrast, involves a rigid pattern of thinking that lacks the openness, flexibility, and creativity required to generate funny comments and anecdotes. Moreover, when individuals are thinking negatively, they are less able to access and retrieve information and memories that are incongruent with their current negative state ( Bower, 1981 ; Ingram, Steidtmann, & Bistricky, 2008 ). Moreover, depending on the content of negative distortions, individuals may be assuming that others do not think well of them or will not respond favorably to their efforts to be humorous. If the content of their thinking is self-focused, they may lack the self-efficacy and confidence to make a joke in an effort to bond with others or ‘lighten the mood.’ Similarly, all types of cognitive distortions were associated with reduced Self-Enhancing humor. This finding is likely due to similar reasons as above. Furthermore, it is likely difficult to adopt a humorous, cheerful perspective and to feel amusement when the valence and content of one’s thoughts are in direct conflict. As a predominantly cognitive construct, Self-Enhancing humor is unlikely to coincide with negative cognitive distortions. Aggressive humor was only associated with overall frequency and social frequency of cognitive distortions, such that greater frequency of cognitive distortions was related to increased use of Aggressive humor. Cognitive distortions may involve thoughts that others are hostile or have bad intentions, leading the individual to engage in Aggressive humor out of defensiveness or to retaliate for perceived hostility. The finding that Aggressive humor was not associated with other facets of cognitive distortions is consistent with past research that Aggressive humor is not related to self-esteem ( Martin et al., 2003 ), a construct that represents negatively biased views of the self, and therefore has overlap with cognitive distortions. It is possible that use of Aggressive humor is driven more by other variables, such as hostility. Finally, Self-Defeating humor was positively associated with all forms of cognitive distortions. Individuals who engage in biased negative thinking about themselves may attempt to use humor to gain the approval of others to feel better but, because the content of their thoughts is negative, are more likely to retrieve negative self-relevant information and beliefs, and therefore generate humor that is consistent and is therefore self-disparaging.

An additional goal of this study was to examine whether humor styles mediate the relation of cognitive distortions with dysphoria. Humor styles can be conceptualized as emotion regulation, coping, and communication strategies that are likely influenced by the frequency and impact of cognitive distortions and that may in turn influence severity of depression. Multiple mediation analyses indicated that humor styles partially mediated all types of cognitive distortions, with the exception of the frequency of cognitive distortions in achievement-relevant situations. It is possible that other, less socially relevant behaviours play a role in influencing dysphoria in these contexts, such as procrastination, avoidant coping, and rumination. All other cognitive distortions (overall frequency, frequency in social contexts, overall impact, and impact in social and achievement contexts) were mediated by Self-Enhancing humor, such that cognitive distortions predicted reduced use of Self-Enhancing humor, which in turn predicted greater depressive symptoms. This finding suggests that the experience of negative thinking may interfere with an individual’s ability to adopt a humorous and cheerful outlook on life (i.e., use Self-Enhancing humor) as a way of regulating emotions and coping with stress, thereby resulting in elevated depressive symptoms. In addition, use of Self-Defeating humor (along with decreased Self-Enhancing humor), partially mediated the relation of the impact of cognitive distortions in social situations with dysphoria. Therefore, individuals who experience cognitive distortions in social situations may respond to these thoughts by attempting to connect with others by making jokes at their own expense. This strategy backfires, however, and results in increased dysphoria. The use of Self-Defeating humor may reinforce the individual’s negative self-concept (thereby increasing negative affect), especially when others appear to agree with the individual’s humorous actions or statements, or to react to their use of humor in a rejecting manner. Altogether, these findings are consistent with past research, which found that Self-Enhancing and Self-Defeating humor styles are more predictive of emotional well-being and distress, including depression, than are Affiliative and Aggressive humor, variables for which mediation was not found. Among the positive humor styles, Self-Enhancing humor is more relevant to cognition, whereas Affiliative humor is more relevant to relationships, which could explain why Self-Enhancing humor plays a role in the relationship of cognitive distortions and depression. Among the negative humor styles, Self-Defeating humor is related to self-esteem, a variable associated with both cognitive distortions and depression, whereas Aggressive humor is not, which similarly could explain why Self-Defeating humor was the only maladaptive humor style to demonstrate mediating effects.

A limitation of this study was its cross-sectional design. We cannot rule out, based on the current data, whether humor styles actually precede the tendency to engage in distorted thinking, that prior depression predicts cognitive distortions and use of humor styles, or that an unmeasured third variable accounts for both cognitive distortions and humor style. Moreover, current depressive symptomatology may have influenced the use or reporting of humor styles. Although temporal precedence cannot be determined based on the current study, results are consistent with the hypothesis that the association of cognitive distortions and dysphoria is at least partially mediated by reduced use of adaptive humor and, in one case, increased use of maladaptive humor, to cope with stress. In addition, the generalizability of the study is limited by the nature of the sample, which was predominantly comprised of young adult Caucasian females. Whether the same results would be obtained in a clinical sample (e.g., individuals with major depression) with greater endorsement of cognitive distortions and depressive symptoms, or in a sample with a greater proportion of males, is an empirical question for future research. Longitudinal research is needed to examine changes in the relationships between cognitive distortions, humor styles, and depression across the lifespan. Moreover, future research should examine the relation of cognitive distortions with humor styles and depressive symptoms using behavioural and process measures. An examination of whether information processing influences the ability to use various styles of humor when an individual has recently engaged in distorted thinking is another question worthy of further study.

This study demonstrates that cognitive distortions, which represent a cognitive vulnerability to depression, are mediated by low use of an adaptive humor style, Self-Enhancing humor (with the exception of frequency of cognitive distortions in achievement-related contexts) and, in one case (social impact of cognitive distortions), use of a maladaptive humor style (i.e., Self-Defeating humor). Mediating effects were not found for Affiliative and Aggressive humor. Furthermore, these findings add to the already extensive literature that supports the discriminant and construct validity of the four scales of the HSQ ( Martin, 2015 ; see Heintz & Ruch, 2015 ). From a treatment perspective, increasing use of adaptive coping strategies for managing stressful situations (in particular use of Self-Enhancing humor) and decreasing use of maladaptive strategies may be useful for individuals experiencing depressive symptoms. Targeting cognitive distortions themselves in order to shift an individual toward more evidence-based thinking may also be useful in altering use of humor and decreasing depressive symptomatology. However, future research is needed to examine these questions and to determine the specific mechanisms through which cognitive distortions and humor styles confer risk for depression.

Acknowledgments

The authors have no support to report.

Biographies

Katerina Rnic is a PhD candidate in the clinical psychology program at the University of Western Ontario. Her research interests include cognitive vulnerability, stress generation in depression, and how cognitive and behavioural vulnerabilities relate to the generation of and response to depressogenic life events, particularly those involving rejection.

David J. A. Dozois is a Full Professor of Psychology and Director of the Clinical Psychology Graduate Program at the University of Western Ontario. His research focuses on cognitive vulnerability to depression and cognitive-behavioral theory/therapy.

Rod A. Martin is a professor emeritus of clinical psychology at the University of Western Ontario. His research focuses on the conceptualization and measurement of sense of humor, and on the association between humor and psychosocial well-being.

This research was supported in part by a Standard Research Grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) and a SSHRC Vanier Canada Graduate Scholarship.

The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

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Cognitive Distortions: Unhelpful Thinking Habits

Cognitive distortions: an introduction to how CBT describes unhelpful ways of thinking

Cognitive distortions or ‘ unhelpful thinking styles ’ are ways that our thoughts can become biased. As conscious beings we are always interpreting the world around us, trying to make sense of what is happening. Sometimes our brains take ‘short cuts’ and generate results that are not completely accurate. Different cognitive short cuts result in different kinds of bias or distortions in our thinking. Sometimes we might jump to the worst possible conclusion, at other times we might blame ourselves for things that are not our fault. Cognitive distortions happen automatically – we don’t mean to think inaccurately – but unless we learn to notice them they can have powerful yet invisible effects upon our moods and our lives. Cognitive distortions were first noted by Aaron Beck in his research with depressed patients in the 1960’s [1]. They formed a central part of his cognitive theory of depression [2] and, later, cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) .

A good example of a cognitive distortion is what Beck originally called ‘selective abstraction’ but which is often now referred to as a ‘mental filter’. It describes our tendency to focus on one detail, often taken out of context, and ignore other more important parts of an experience. For example, Jenny delivered some teaching at her workplace and got a round of applause at the end as well as numerous colleagues telling her how well she did and how helpful they had found her presentation. When she looked at the feedback forms afterwards she noticed one form with critical comments and a poor rating. She couldn’t stop thinking about this one piece of negative feedback and criticized herself saying “I’m such a rubbish teacher” . As a result she felt awful. Jenny’s thinking process was distorted because she had managed to ignore all of the positive feedback she had received and focus solely on the negative. She did this automatically and without realizing she had done it.

How Beck identified cognitive distortions

Cognitive distortions in the context of cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) were first described by Aaron Beck in his 1963 paper ‘Thinking and depression: 1. Idiosyncratic content and cognitive distortions’ [1]. Beck was a psychiatrist who had also trained in psychoanalysis. In the 1960’s he was conducting research into the treatment of depression. Part of Beck’s research in a psychiatric clinic involved conducting interviews with depressed patients whom he was seeing for psychotherapy. The interviews were conducted when the patients were moderately to severely depressed. The patients were encouraged to free associate (talk freely) and Beck’s policy was to intervene only minimally, taking notes as his patients spoke. Some patients also kept notes of their feelings and thoughts between sessions which Beck used as additional data.

When Beck examined what his patients had told him he noticed themes in the cognitive content of the depressed patients and noted that:

“A crucial characteristic of the cognitions with this content was that they represented varying degrees of distortion of reality. While some degree of inaccuracy and inconsistency would be expected in the cognitions of any individual, the distinguishing characteristic of the depressed patients was that they showed a systematic error; viz, a bias against themselves.”

Beck noted that distortions were particularly likely to be present when the situations (cues) are ambiguous. Using a computational metaphor Beck described what he was observing in his patients as ‘faulty information processing’:

“He [the depressed patient] tends to perceive his present, future, and the outside world (the cognitive triad) in a negative way and consequently shows a biased interpretation of his experiences, negative expectancies as to the probable success of anything he undertakes, and a massive amount of self-criticism”.

Beck’s cognitive distortions

Beck included five cognitive distortions in his original list published in 1963 [1], and added an additional two in Cognitive Therapy of Depression which was published in 1979 [2]. Beck’s cognitive distortions included:

Example: As John walked down the street he thought to himself “Everyone can tell that I’m a loser” . This thought is distorted for a number of reasons: John has no way of knowing what ‘everyone’ thinks, and it is extremely unlikely that anybody is even thinking about him since most people are likely to be wrapped up in their own concerns just as he is.

Example of selective abstraction: Jenny delivered some teaching at her workplace and got a round of applause at the end as well as numerous people saying how well she did and how helpful they had found her presentation. When she looked at the feedback forms she noticed one form with critical comments and a poor rating. She couldn’t stop thinking about this feedback and criticised herself saying “I’m such a rubbish teacher” . Jenny’s thinking is distorted in this case because she has automatically focused on the one negative piece of feedback to the exclusion of all the positive feedback – her judgement of her teaching was not a fair reflection of the evidence.

Example of overgeneralization: Carl gets a C- on a piece of homework, thinks to himself “I’m going to fail everything” , and feels hopeless. Carl’s thinking is distorted in this case because the conclusion he is reaching is too broad given the evidence. It is equally plausible that his c-minus is a ‘blip’ and that he will do well on tests in the future, or that there were good reasons why he got a poor grade this time that could be remedied in the future.

Example of magnification: Paul’s baby is sick on his only clean shirt before he has to go to work to give a presentation. He has an image of his boss noticing, giving him a disgusted look, and firing him on the spot. Paul’s thinking (an image in this case) is an example of magnification because he is imagining and paying attention to a worst-case scenario.

Example of minimization: Emma’s friend was the third person to try to tell her that she thought Emma was drinking too much and putting herself in danger. Emma dismissed her concerns by saying “You’re like everyone else, you worry too much” and thought to herself “I don’t know what they’re all so worried about” .

When we apply labels to others we can feel frustrated, when we apply them to ourselves we can feel depressed.

Example of labeling: Someone bumps into Sally as she gets off the train. Sally calls the person a “complete f****** idiot” and feels furious. Her conclusion that the person who bumped her is a ‘complete idiot’ is a distortion because it is such an extreme interpretation of what happened. A more benign (and realistic) interpretation is that the other person was simply clumsy or made a mistake.

Example of personalization: On Sam’s journey to work he steps in a puddle, realizes he has forgotten his watch, and has to rush after his train is late. He thinks “the world has got it in for me” and feels deflated. Naturally Sam has placed himself at the centre of the story (we all tend to be somewhat egocentric), but his thinking is biased because he has assigned agency to the world around him and he is implicitly making the prediction that the world will continue to ‘have it in for him’.

Example of absolutistic dichotomous thinking: Tanya either did things perfectly or not at all. If she saw the slightest speck of dust at home she saw it as ‘filthy’. She was similarly strict with descriptions of herself – she was either doing ok, or was failing in every way. Her thinking is biased because she fails to see life in the ‘shades of grey’ that it actually operates.

Burns’ unhelpful thinking styles

Dr David Burns was an early student of Aaron Beck who has done much to popularize CBT. In his self-help book Feeling Good [6] he compares unhelpful thinking styles to the kinds of illusions performed by magicians “When you are depressed, you possess the remarkable ability to believe, and to get the people around you to believe, things which have no basis in reality”. Importantly, he used language that made cognitive distortions more engaging and understandable. Burns’ unhelpful thinking styles include:

Other unhelpful thinking styles

As well as the cognitive distortions described by Beck and Burns many other cognitive biases have been identified by researchers. Cognitive biases are ways in which human thinking is not 100% accurate or is systematically subject to errors. Rachman and Shafran [7] describe cognitive bias as “a particular style of thinking that is consistent, non-veridical, and skewed” . Some examples of other cognitive biases include:

The ‘availability heuristic’ which describes our tendency to overestimate the likelihood of events with greater ‘availability’ in memory (i.e. ones which we remember better).
The ‘confirmation bias’ which is the tendency to search for, interpret, focus on, and remember information which is consistent with our preconceptions.
The ‘Dunning-Kreuger effect’ which describes tendency for unskilled individuals to overestimate their own ability and the tendency for experts to underestimate their own ability.
‘Stereotyping’ which describes how we expect a member of a group to have certain characteristics without having actual information about that individual.

The number of ways that human thinking can be biased is very large (Wikipedia keeps an exhaustive list of cognitive biases) and although any could conceivably be affecting clients seeking therapy only a minority have traditionally been considered to be relevant to CBT practitioners. Some of the most important cognitive distortions that are frequently relevant to clinicians are outlined here.

Rachman and Shafran give the example of the TAF bias in a patient with OCD who dreaded going to bed because he feared that we would die in his sleep. He rated the probability of this happening highly (10-20% per night) and reported that his belief was high because he experienced the unwanted thought that he would die in his sleep. He believed that other people who did not share similar thoughts were at much lower risk of dying in their sleep. His TAF represents a bias because there is no actual link between dying in one’s sleep and thoughts of it occurring. His bias meant that he had managed to ignore all of the many occasions where he had thought of dying in his sleep and yet had not died.

Therapist: Could we explore this idea that you are responsible for being attacked because you got into the attacker’s car voluntarily? Client: Sure. Therapist: Did you have any idea of his actual intentions when he offered to drive you home that night? Client: No, he was often the designated driver and he had taken many of us home safely before. Therapist: And that night was no different? Client: I didn’t have any reason to think so. We had all had a nice time that night and I didn’t have any reason to think differently. Therapist: When was it that you realized you should not have got into his car? Client: When he attacked me. Therapist: So how could you have known not to get into his car when you got into his car? Client: I guess I couldn’t have known.

Some clinicians have argued that hindsight bias has the emotionally positive effect of making unwanted events seem foreseeable. The thinking goes something like this: “If bad events are foreseeable and I just missed it that time, then as long as I am vigilant I will be able to spot bad events in the future” . Thinking in this way can be reassuring because it makes us feel that we are in control of whether or not bad things happen to us. However, it is biased because it fails to reflect the sad truths that some traumas are not foreseeable and that sometimes bad things happen to good people.

Self-blame may offer some illusion of control. For example that a negative outcome was potentially controllable or avoidable (often seen in trauma patients).
Self-blame avoids attacks on others. If we allow ourselves to blame others it might lead to a strong desire to retaliate which might also elicit an overpowering counter-attack from others. In circumstances where this might be possible self-blame would be a ‘better safe than sorry’ tactic.
Self-blame may be a learned response. As a relatively powerless child it may be safer, and elicit less parental anger, to blame ourselves and act submissively. In households with anger-prone parents children may sadly have many opportunities to learn this cognitive style.

Why do we think in unhelpful ways?

So far we have explored common cognitive distortions in CBT, learned how unhelpful thinking styles are apparent in our automatic thoughts, and have learned about the evidence for their impact on people’s mood. But where do unhelpful thinking styles come from? To answer this question we have to learn more about the theory of CBT. According to the cognitive model there are different levels of cognition:

Figure: Levels of cognition specified in the cognitive model are: Core beliefs; Intermediate beliefs (rules, attitudes, assumptions); Automatic thoughts.

Core beliefs are a fundamental level of belief. Judith Beck characterizes them as “global, rigid, and overgeneralized” [10]. Automatic thoughts are specific to the situation in which they are generated. Assumptions, attitudes, and rules are an intermediate level of belief which develops as the individual tries to make sense of the world around them. The cognitive model suggests that the particular kinds of automatic thoughts to which we are prone are a result of the core and intermediate beliefs that we hold. Or to put it another way: if our automatic thoughts are biased, then these biases are driven by our beliefs and assumptions. You can think of automatic thoughts as the plants that grow: which plants grow will depend on the kind of soil that we give them. To give some clinical examples:

David had grown up in a household where his parents were very critical and placed great emphasis on academic achievement. His brother did well academically but David always struggled to meet his parent’s high standards. He has developed the core belief “I’m useless” and the (protective) assumption “As long as I achieve I am ok” . When he fails a test he has the automatic thought “I’m a complete failure” characterized by the ‘dichotomous thinking’ error.

Rochelle experienced a lot of abuse as a child. Her parents were neglectful, she was abused by a relative, and she was bullied throughout her school career. She held the beliefs “I am unlovable” and “People will only ever hurt me” . She was quick to assume that others were likely to harm her, felt anxious, and struggled to form meaningful relationships. In therapy an examination of her automatic thoughts revealed lots of catastrophizing. Discussing some of the assumptions that she held Rochelle said that she always assumed the worst because that was what life had typically given her. Rochelle’s example is interesting because her catastrophizing bias was potentially adaptive during her dangerous childhood, but may be less helpful for her as an adult.

A fascinating insight from Beck’s Cognitive Therapy of Depression is that each cognitive error is driven by specific assumptions [2]. If it is our automatic thoughts that are biased, then the biases are driven by our beliefs and assumptions: “Patient’s cognitive errors are derived from some type of assumption” . Table 1 gives some examples of cognitive errors and the associated assumptions:


Assuming temporal causality (predicting without sufficient evidence) / Jumping to conclusions		If it has been true in the past then it’s always going to be true.
Catastrophizing		Always think the worst, it’s most likely to happen to you.
Dichotomous thinking / Black and white thinking		Everything is either one extreme or the other.
Excessive responsibility / Personalization		I’m responsible for all bad things, failures, etc.
Hindsight bias		All (bad) events are foreseeable. Understanding right now the chain of events that led to a (bad) outcome means that the event was foreseeable at the time.
Labelling		It is possible and fair to sum up an entire human being and their life in one word.
Overgeneralizing		If it’s true in one case it applies to any case which is even slightly similar.
Selective abstraction / mental filter		The only events that matter are failures. I should measure myself by my errors.
Thought-action fusion		Having a thought increases the chances of that event happening (probability TAF). Having a thought is morally equivalent to carrying out that act (morality TAF).

Table 1 : Unhelpful thinking styles (cognitive distortions) and associated assumptions.

“Why do we think in unhelpful ways?” part two: an evolutionary view

The ability for humans to think in abstract ways is the product of evolution. We have brains that allow us to think about things other than the here-and-now because that ability has benefited the survival of our species. One implication of this insight is that thinking itself is likely to have been optimized for survival rather than accuracy. Paul Gilbert published a fascinating evolutionary take on cognitive distortions in 1998 [8]. In it he reviews developmental explanations for cognitive distortions including the psychoanalytic approach viewing distortions as “resulting from unconscious motivations and conflicts originating in childhood” and the cognitive approach whereby cognitive distortions are “schema-driven reasoning errors” originating in belief structures laid down in childhood.

Gilbert proposes that an evolutionary explanation does not necessarily conflict with developmental explanations but can exist as a complementary view. A summary of his argument is that:

Humans often reason on the basis of heuristics rather than logic (i.e. we have fast and slow thinking [11])
The heuristics that humans use are probably the result of natural selection (12)
It follows that “Although some forms of reasoning may lead to distress and appear as cognitive distortions this does not necessarily mean they reflect errors in processing as such but rather the activation of evolved (previously) adaptive heuristics and algorithms.” [8]

Gilbert goes on to argue that “Although cognitive therapists stress the importance of rational decision making, and the importance of testing the evidence, evolution has only enabled rationality to emerge in so far as it aids survival and inclusive fitness” [8]. He proposes that animals have evolved a ‘better safe than sorry’ threat detection system which has a tendency to assume the worst and that information processing has therefore evolved to minimize the cost of mistakes, but not mistakes themselves. In his view information processing is inherently biased in the service of helping us to stay alive. The implication of this line of thinking is that some of the common unhelpful thinking styles may confer an evolutionary advantage. Consider the following biases:

This evolutionary approach to cognitive distortions has interesting clinical implications for cognitive behavioral therapists working with clients who think in unhelpful ways. Gilbert’s ideas have since developed into the distinct therapeutic approach of Compassion Focused Therapy (CFT) . In CFT cognitive distortions are not necessarily combated directly. Instead, what CFT brings is a layer of scientifically-grounded understanding to thoughts. Therapists might articulate the idea “No wonder you think this way – you have a tricky brain which is designed for survival instead of happiness” . Instead of direct restructuring the approach helps clients to soften their attitude towards themselves and reduces personal responsibility by viewing them as a product of an evolved brain (which it is not your fault for having). Clinicians interested in helping clients to foster self-compassion are advised to read further regarding the Compassion Focused Therapy (CFT) approach.

Thinking in a balanced way: treatment of unhelpful thinking styles with CBT

Helping clients to think in a more balanced fashion is a core component of traditional cognitive therapy. Clinicians may need to move clients through a number of stages in order to effectively help them to overcome unhelpful and habitual cognitive biases.

Help your clients understand about automatic thoughts Your clients need to understand that everybody experiences automatic thoughts and images. Essential information to impart is that automatic thoughts are involuntary cognitions which can be triggered by external stimuli in the world around us, or by internal stimuli consisting of our own emotions, body sensations, and other cognitive content (thoughts, images, memories, urges). Automatic thoughts are often highly believable, and if believed or allowed to pass unchallenged they can have a profound and detrimental effect upon our emotional state.

Train your clients to catch their automatic thoughts using thought records Traditional cognitive therapy is interested in our cognitive content. This means that your clients need to know what thoughts and images are going through their minds if they are to be able to balance their thinking. Thought records are a brilliant way of catching our automatic thoughts. Clients are encouraged to complete thought records whenever they notice a significant change in how they are feeling – this is a strong clue that they have had an automatic thought . At their simplest, thought records consist of a form with space to record information about the situation in which a thought occurred, the thought or image itself, and how it made them feel. Clients are encouraged to record their thoughts and images as close as possible to the time they occurred as that way the recorded information is likely to be as detailed as possible.

Understand and notice cognitive biases Understanding about unhelpful thinking styles can be extremely normalizing and destigmatizing. Many clients like to see handouts of cognitive biases. As a clinician it can be helpful to ask “Do you recognize yourself in any of these biases?” – clients will frequently identify with many (sometimes all) of the common cognitive biases. Judicious therapist use of self-disclosure can be helpful when working with reticent or shame-prone clients.

To help your clients learn to recognize unhelpful thinking styles in their daily life you can use the Dysfunctional Thought Record . This thought record has columns for recording standard information about situations, thoughts and emotions, but also contains prompts to help clients practice identifying the biases present in their thoughts.

Cognitive restructuring Cognitive restructuring , or challenging the content of our negative automatic thoughts is a mainstay of CBT. We discuss the process of challenging our negative automatic thoughts extensively elsewhere, but clinicians should be aware of the wide variety of techniques available to them including:

Traditional disputation . The traditional disputation method of cognitive restructuring involves examining the evidence for and against a thought. Clients often find it easy to generate reasons why a thought is true, but may initially need assistance to consider reasons why a particular thought might not be 100% true all of the time. Once evidence for and against an automatic thought has been generated clients can be asked to write a balanced thought which takes into account all of the collected evidence.
Court-trial style disputation . Some clients find it helpful to view the disputation process using the metaphor of a court trial. The automatic thought is put ‘in the dock’. The job of a defence lawyer is to argue that the thought is true while the job of the prosecution is to argue that it is false. A jury weighs the evidence and the judge reads a verdict: a considered alternative which takes into account all of the evidence.
Compassionate cognitive restructuring . Cognitive restructuring can be completed in a compassionate framework by: examining the negative thought through a compassionate lens, activating the self-other compassion system by considering the perspective of what you would say to others in a similar situation, and activating the other-self compassion system by thinking about what a compassionate other would say to you.

Making the restructured thinking habitual One favoured approach amongst expert practitioners is to intervene with fewer techniques but to ensure that clients benefit maximally from each. It is often helpful for clients to ‘overlearn’ the habit of noticing their automatic thoughts and restructuring their negative automatic thinking. Once clients have had sufficient practice using paper-and-pencil thought records it is worthwhile to encourage them go through the disputation practice in their head. Many clients report that it soon becomes second-nature to them to notice automatic thoughts and to ask themselves “What is the evidence for believing that this thought is true?” .

Once symptoms have (at least partially) remitted shift to targeting assumptions Each cognitive distortion is underpinned by assumptions specific to that distortion. For example, catastrophizing is underpinned by the assumptions “always think the worst” and “the worst is likely to happen to you” , and hindsight bias is underpinned by the assumption “understanding right now the chain of events that led to a (bad) outcome means that the event was foreseeable at the time” . Beck and colleagues argue that if clients hold dysfunctional assumptions like these they are more prone to thinking in a distorted manner [2]. The clinical implication is that working to make these assumptions ‘visible’ and then to challenge them makes clients more resilient and less prone to the recurrence of difficulties. Beck and colleagues suggest a variety of techniques for working effectively with assumptions including:

Listing the advantages vs. disadvantages of the assumptions
Acting against the assumption
Playing “devil’s advocate” and having the client supply counterarguments
Examining the long-term vs. short-term utility of the assumptions

Consider using cognitive bias modification Cognitive bias modification is a relatively recent approach with only preliminary supporting evidence. Nevertheless it is a potentially interesting method for working with unhelpful thinking styles. The theory behind cognitive bias modification is that vulnerability to anxiety is driven by selective information processing. For example in cognitive testing, anxious individuals reliably demonstrate an attentional bias towards negative information (attentional bias), and when presented with ambiguous stimuli are more likely to interpret them with negative meanings (interpretive bias). Whereas traditional cognitive restructuring works with distorted thoughts once they have arisen, cognitive bias modification is “designed to change the cognitive processes that give rise to such thinking” [14]. This is accomplished through repeated computer-based tasks which operate to retrain how an individual interprets ambiguous stimuli. There is some evidence that interpretive bias modification (CBM-I) can lead to reductions in anxiety sensitivity and trait anxiety in analogue populations [14] and hope that this will translate into tangible clinical benefits.

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[1] Beck, A. T. (1963). Thinking and depression: I. Idiosyncratic content and cognitive distortions. Archives of General Psychiatry , 9 (4), 324-333.

[2] Beck, A. T., Rush, A. J., Shaw, B. F., Emery, G. (1979). Cognitive Therapy of Depression . New York: Guilford press.

[3] Krantz, S., & Hammen, C. L. (1979). Assessment of cognitive bias in depression. Journal of Abnormal Psychology , 88 (6), 611.

[4] McDermut, J. F., Haaga, D. A., & Bilek, L. A. (1997). Cognitive bias and irrational beliefs in major depression and dysphoria. Cognitive Therapy and Research , 21 (4), 459-476.

[5] Mathews, A., Mackintosh, B., & Fulcher, E. P. (1997). Cognitive biases in anxiety and attention to threat. Trends in Cognitive Sciences , 1(9), 340-345.

[6] Burns, D. D. (1980). Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy .

[7] Rachman, S., & Shafran, R. (1999). Cognitive distortions: Thought–action fusion. Clinical Psychology & Psychotherapy: An International Journal of Theory & Practice , 6(2), 80-85.

[8] Gilbert, P. (1998). The evolved basis and adaptive functions of cognitive distortions. British Journal of Medical Psychology , 71(4), 447-463.

[9] Baumeister, R. F., Tice, D. M., & Hutton, D. G. (1989). Self‐presentational motivations and personality differences in self‐esteem. Journal of Personality , 57(3), 547-579.

[10] Beck, J. S. (1995). Cognitive therapy: Basics and beyond . New York: Guilford.

[11] Kahneman, D., & Egan, P. (2011). Thinking, fast and slow . New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

[12] Cosmides, L. (1989). The logic of social exchange: Has natural selection shaped how humans reason? Studies with the Wason selection task. Cognition , 31(3), 187-276.

[13] Driscoll, R. (1989). Self-condemnation: A comprehensive framework for assessment and treatment. Psychotherapy: Theory, Research, Practice, Training , 26(1), 104.

[14] MacLeod, C., & Mathews, A. (2012). Cognitive bias modification approaches to anxiety. Annual Review of Clinical Psychology , 8, 189-217.

APA reference for this article

Whalley, M. G. (2019). Unhelpful thinking styles: cognitive distortions in CBT. Psychology Tools. Retrieved on [date], from https://www.psychologytools.com/articles/unhelpful-thinking-styles-cognitive-distortions-in-cbt/

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Research in Autism and the Brain (RAB) Lab

University of washington department of psychiatry & behavioral sciences, temple grandin: different kinds of minds, by curtis eayrs.

Professor, inventor and author Temple Grandin spoke to a sold-out audience Thursday, March 8 th at UW’s Kane Hall. This lecture was sponsored by the UW Graduate School and UW Alumni Association. Before the lecture, there was a meet-a nd-greet opportunity where the audience could meet Temple and have photos taken with her. Temple’s speaking style was candid, filled with humor, and demonstrated her passion for striving to help society better understand the complexities of the autistic mind. She discusses four different types of thinking: 1) Photo Realistic Visual Thinking; 2) Pattern Thinker; 3) Verbal Facts Language Translation Thinking; and 4) Auditory Thinking. She believes the American educational system doesn’t adequately address variability in these thinking styles in today’s K-12 public education system. Compared to America, Europeans use many different educational models in teaching their children that recognize different thinking styles. Hence, the outcome of this holistic approach is that Western Europe is significantly increasing its workforce, technical and skilled trades’ prowess in the highly-competitive global marketplace for talent.

She also mentioned that creative geniuses such as Thomas Alva Edison and Albert Einstein might be labeled as being on the autism spectrum if they were raised in modern-day society. Temple prescribed seven rules for maximizing likelihood of successful integration of children with ASD into becoming functional adults:

Follow your passion, and learn everything you can about it.
Be yourself, but you have to fit in a little.
Develop your talents.
Perfect is not possible.
Never stop learning.

I thoroughly enjoyed Temple’s lecture and applaud her perseverance overcoming obstacles of her retroactive autistic diagnosis, demonstrating by her accomplishments what is truly possible if you put your mind to it. After the event, I was inspired to buy a couple of her books to learn more about her views on the autistic mind, from the viewpoint of a “subject matter expert.” She serves as an excellent role model for those who are on the autism spectrum and has very practical advice for moving children from “out of the basement playing video games all day.”

The UW Graduate School moderator mentioned that a podcast of this lecture will be available soon. If you want to learn more about Temple Grandin’s story, HBO created a 2010 film titled “Temple Grandin” starring Claire Danes as the title character.

To read this content please select one of the options below:

Please note you do not have access to teaching notes, thinking styles and conflict management: a gamified empirical study.

International Journal of Organizational Analysis

ISSN : 1934-8835

Article publication date: 14 June 2023

Issue publication date: 3 June 2024

Individual differences cause many differences in human behaviour, and the first source of these differences is personality. In various organisations, employees are encouraged to manage conflict through conflict management styles. The way people think can be an essential factor in their ability to conflict management. Difficult employees are individuals who constantly use problematic communication styles to express their feelings and thoughts to direct the behaviour of others. This empirical study aims to investigate the effect of thinking styles on individuals’ conflict management in dealing with difficult personalities.

Design/methodology/approach

To achieve the research purpose, a gamified situation was designed, and a survey was performed in laboratory settings and on an online platform. At first, participants’ reactions were measured in the simulated conflict management situation dealing with difficult personalities; subsequently, the dominant thinking style of participants was measured by the rational-experiential inventory (REI) and the cognitive reflection test. At the end, participants answered a series of demographic questions.

The collected data were then analysed by regression analysis. Based on the findings of this study, the rational thinking measured by the REI40 has a significant and positive effect on the performance of individuals in conflict management with difficult personalities in an organisational context; in other words, rational thinking leads to better performance in conflict management than experiential thinking.

Originality/value

The value of this article lies in the direct study of the impact of thinking styles on conflict management, which was done by focusing on difficult organisational personalities. Also, using gamification in research design is another research initiative.

Difficult personalities
Dual processing models
Conflict management
Thinking styles
Gamification

Hendijani, R. and Ahmadi, M.M. (2024), "Thinking styles and conflict management: a gamified empirical study", International Journal of Organizational Analysis , Vol. 32 No. 5, pp. 834-860. https://doi.org/10.1108/IJOA-12-2022-3538

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Thinking Styles

1) synthesists: this may be your thinking style if you, 2) idealists: this may your thinking style if you, 3) pragmatists: this may be your thinking style if you, 4) analysts: this may be your thinking style if you, 5) realists: this may be your thinking style if you.

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Writing a Psychology Case Study: Mastering the Skill

Creating case studies is an exciting and challenging assignment, isn't it? You are to combine theoretical data and practical skills when writing this paper. Analytical thinking is also a great help in this field. The project is quite useful in psychological, medical, educational, and social spheres.

Why are case studies important in psychology? They give a wonderful chance

to understand personal behavior and manners,
to investigate symptoms and offer effective treatment,
to interpret group or individual identity.

Today we'll discuss the meaning of psychological case studies – the definition, types, and benefits – and offer a few useful tips on how to write these papers. So let's start the exploration.

Case Studies in Psychology: Making an Overview

Generally, a case study means an extensive analysis of a person, group, or episode. It may concern any aspect of the target's life. This method appears to be effective when it is impossible to carry out an experiment.

Well, what is a case study in psychology? A psychology case study implies a focused information gathering in terms of life reality – behavior, manners, habits, and whatnot. Mostly, it touches on the practical state of affairs, not theoretical matters. You may collect data by psychometric testing, observing, interviewing, and looking through archival materials. The process may resemble looking at the target object through a magnifier.

Due to psychology case studies nature, they play a crucial role in human mind investigation:

give a meticulous description of personal or collective behavior;
help to examine the specificity of every unique case;
provide practical evidence for theoretical hypotheses;
bring a complete understanding of the investigated phenomenon;
produce a wide range of practical applications.

Case Studies in Psychology: Types and Features

The case study method in psychology is a complicated issue. There are different types of studies, and each of them assists in a separate field.

Descriptive	They are held to formulate a detailed description of the particular case, especially for approving a hypothesis.
Exploratory	Usually they are a start for further, more comprehensive investigation.
Explanatory	They are used to define the reasons for a researched matter.
Instrumental	The target of the observation serves as a tool for illustrating any psychological theory.
Intrinsic	Giving data about specific aspects of a particular phenomenon, they imply investigating in personal interests.

Besides, they may be:

individual or collective (according to the number of target persons);
cross-sectional or longitudinal (marking a situation in a distinct time point or a long period correspondingly).

Benefits of Case Studies in Psychology

Psychological Case Studies have a few advantages if comparing this method with other investigation issues in this sphere:

It provides a bright picture of the phenomenon, showing its nuances and specificity.
It is quite easy to be carried out, especially in practical and ethical terms.
It gives a true-to-life, rather objective context.
It is a good educational tool.
It presents a possibility of flexible investigating, adaptable to current circumstances.

8 Hints on How to Write a Case Study in Psychology

If you come across creating a psychological case study, be attentive, observant, and patient. It is perfect if you have both analytical and storytelling skills. They occur rather helpful when writing this kind of paper. To simplify the situation we offer a few recommendations concerning the composing process.

Make up a subject profile. It should be specified enough, containing the target's name, age, status, and other necessary personal information.
single-subject or collective,
cross-sectional or longitudinal,
exploratory, explanatory, illustrative, instrumental, or others.
personal history,
various psychological factors (traits of character, emotional manifestations, and other similar matters),
social aspects (environmental impacts on the person)
events, having influenced the target greatly, etc.
Make a meticulous description of the target issue that is the focus of the investigation. As a rule, it is to comprise symptoms, problems, and behavior specificity. It is also advisable to record the exact time and duration of issue expressions if there are any.
Analyze all the gathered data.
Produce the diagnosis and offer a treatment strategy (therapy, medicines, changes in lifestyle, etc).
Comment on the process of treatment and its aims.
Make up a discussion section, interpreting all the results of the study and offering an area for further work.

Having explored the case study definition in psychology in detail, you are certain to realize what data to gather and how to perform a successful result without trouble. Moreover, at any moment you may turn to Aithor – an AI-powered generator – to get an example of a topical study case project.

7 General Tips for Writing a Psychology Case Study

There are a few additional tips on how to produce a fine case study in psychology.

Be sure that you may communicate with the target and operate with necessary information freely.
Prepare an elaborate study case outline.
Record every matter you get in the course of the investigation.
Respect the ethical norms.
Discuss the case with colleagues and professionals.
Analyze everything thoroughly.
Be precise, patient, and persistent.

To cap it all, case studies definition in psychology underlines the practical importance of carrying out such investigations. Learning the episode in detail helps in producing the adequate diagnoses and treatments. So, try to carry out the exploration in the most consistent and clear way possible. We hope that the presented recommendations will assist you in creating fine projects. Good luck!

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How students learn during the pre-briefing and observation of facilitation in a high-fidelity patient simulation: a narrative analysis, 1. introduction, background and literature review, 2. materials and methods, 2.1. study design, 2.2. study aim and objectives, 2.3. sampling and study setting, 2.4. the structured hfps guidelines, 2.5. the instruments, 2.6. study procedure, 2.7. ethical considerations, 2.8. data analysis, 3.1. students’ demographhic characteristics, 3.2. student learning at pre-briefing and the period of being observers during facilitation, 3.3. learning at pre-briefing stage, 3.3.1. adequate learning resources to increase knowledge acquisition, 3.3.2. clear instruction and guidelines, 3.3.3. adequate time for preparation, 3.3.4. self-motivation for competence enhancement in knowledge and skills, 3.4. learning from observation of hfps, 3.4.1. performance of role-players with knowledge and skill applications, 3.4.2. comments on the performance by others, 3.4.3. discussion with other students who were observers, 3.5. in both sessions, 3.5.1. clear guiding questions and observation areas, 3.5.2. self-awareness and attentiveness, 3.5.3. active self-engagement, 4. discussion, 4.1. practical recommendations, 4.2. strengths and limitations, 5. conclusions, institutional review board statement, informed consent statement, data availability statement, conflicts of interest.

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Study Period	Control (by Facilitator A)		Intervention (by Facilitator B)
	Learning objectives	Learning resources	Learning objectives	Learning resources
Pre-briefing	Course intended learning outcomes
Observation period	Not specific

Period	Questions
Post- pre-briefing
Post-role-play observation	According to your observation of the role-player during the HFPS, please provide answers to the following questions:

Period	Observations
During the role-playing	Select a player; observe and comment his/her performance in the following areas for observation.

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Wong, F.M.F. How Students Learn during the Pre-Briefing and Observation of Facilitation in a High-Fidelity Patient Simulation: A Narrative Analysis. Healthcare 2024 , 12 , 1761. https://doi.org/10.3390/healthcare12171761

Wong FMF. How Students Learn during the Pre-Briefing and Observation of Facilitation in a High-Fidelity Patient Simulation: A Narrative Analysis. Healthcare . 2024; 12(17):1761. https://doi.org/10.3390/healthcare12171761

Wong, Florence M. F. 2024. "How Students Learn during the Pre-Briefing and Observation of Facilitation in a High-Fidelity Patient Simulation: A Narrative Analysis" Healthcare 12, no. 17: 1761. https://doi.org/10.3390/healthcare12171761

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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Introduction

Coping Strategies and Three-Dimensional Coping Strategy Model

Three-Fold Model of Intellectual Styles and Thinking Styles

Demographic Factors and Their Relationships With Thinking Styles

Coping Strategies and Their Relationships With Thinking Styles

The Present Study

Participants

Thinking Styles

COPE Revised

Data Analysis

Internal Scale Reliability of TSI-R2 and COPE Revised

Influential Roles of Demographic Factors on Thinking Styles

Predicting Coping Strategies From Thinking Styles With Demographic Factors Controlled

Contributions, Implications, and Limitations

Data Availability Statement

Ethics Statement

Author Contributions

Conflict of Interest

Publisher's Note

Supplementary Material

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Paper Information

Journal Information

Learning and Thinking Styles Based on Whole Brain Theory in Relation to Sensory-Motor Integration

Article Outline

2.2. Validity and Reliability

2.7. Discussion

Cognitive Distortions: 22 Examples & Worksheets (& PDF)

This Article Contains:

David Burns

1. All-or-Nothing Thinking / Polarized Thinking

2. Overgeneralization

3. Mental Filter

4. Disqualifying the Positive

5. Jumping to Conclusions – Mind Reading

6. Jumping to Conclusions – Fortune Telling

7. Magnification (Catastrophizing) or Minimization

8. Emotional Reasoning

9. Should Statements

10. Labeling and Mislabeling

11. Personalization

12. Control Fallacies

13. Fallacy of Fairness

14. Fallacy of Change

15. Always Being Right

16. Heaven’s Reward Fallacy

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Cognitive Distortions, Humor Styles, and Depression

David J. A. Dozois

Participants

Cognitive Distortions Scale (CDS)

Humor Styles Questionnaire (HSQ)

Beck Depression Inventory-II (BDI-II)

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Cognitive Distortions: Unhelpful Thinking Habits