The purpose of this study was to provide an experimental test of the theory of change put forth by A. T. Beck, A. J. Rush, B. F. Shaw, and G. Emery (1979) to explain the efficacy of cognitive-behavioral therapy (CT) for depression. The comparison involved randomly assigning 150 outpatients with major depression to a treatment focused exclusively on the behavioral activation (BA) component of CT...

OBJECTIVES To investigate whether there are two stable types of paranoia, 'poor me' and 'bad me', as described by Trower and Chadwick (1995), and whether beliefs about the deservedness of persecution are associated with psychological measures. METHODS In-patients experiencing persecutory delusions were assigned either to 'poor me' (PM) or 'bad me'(BM) groups, according to their rating of a pe...

This paper assesses the impact that reading violent comic books has on hostile attributional bias using relationally aggressive scenarios. College students (N.85) read either very violent or mildly violent comic books. Participants rated the comic books on levels of violence, humor, interest level, and overall likeability. They also read five hypothetical stories in which a relationally aggress...

The hopelessness theory of depression [Abramson, L. Y., Metalsky, G. I. & Alloy, L. B. (1989). Hopelessness depression: a theory-based subtype of depression. Psychological Review, 96, 358-372.] postulates that a negative attributional style represents a risk factor for a particular constellation of depressive symptoms, termed 'hopelessness depression'. Four studies tested the relation of negati...

OBJECTIVE A number of cognitive biases have been identified relevant to persecutory thought (e.g. exaggerated self-serving bias). Moreover, findings of increased depressed mood in conjunction with high levels of self-esteem have contributed to theories of persecutory ideation (e.g. Bentall, Kinderman, Kaney, 1994). Using a nonclinical sample, the present study sought to expand upon previous res...

BACKGROUND Addiction is considered as one of the major problems in family and community in the world. According to cognitive view, organizing the experiences determines how to behave. Due to their importance in interpretation of special situations, cognitive schemas and attributional styles have a significant role in cognitive theories. The aim of this study was to compare early maladaptive sch...

Providing a developmental extension of the cognitive theories of depression, researchers and theorists have suggested that during early to middle childhood, attributional styles may mediate rather than moderate the association between negative life events and the development of depression. Within the context of the hopelessness theory of depression, we tested this hypothesis in a 6-month longit...

A recovery model of depression (Needles & Abramson, 1990 Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 99, 156-165) proposes that depressed individuals who exhibit an enhancing attributional style for positive events (i.e. make stable, global attributions) will be more likely to regain hopefulness and, thereby, recover from depression when positive events occur. While only a few studies have directly tested ...

Six pigeons were trained using a matching-to-sample procedure where sample and rewarded comparisons matched on both attributional (color) and relational (horizontal or vertical orientation) dimensions. Probes then evaluated the pigeons' preference to comparisons that varied in these dimensions. A strong preference was found for the attribute of color. The discrimination was not found to transfe...

Theories about why immoral behaviors carry a large amount of attributional weight tend to emphasize traditional cognitive variables. In contrast, the authors propose that the degree of negative affect that these behaviors induce in observers is largely responsible for their attributional weight. Studies 1 and 2 demonstrate an association between the amount of negative affect induced by immoral ...