First Advisor

Richard W. Wollert

Date of Publication

Winter 1981

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Science (M.S.) in Psychology

Department

Psychology

Language

English

Subjects

Mental Depression

DOI

10.15760/etd.3056

Physical Description

1 online resource (58 p.)

Abstract

This thesis was an attempt to investigate two important cognitive aspects of depression: expectation of success, and changes in this expectation. Recent studies in these areas have yielded inconsistent results. It has generally been concluded that subclinical depressives do not differ from nondepressives in initial expectation of success, though they do at times exhibit smaller changes in success expectancy following personal experiences of success or failure. Two main cognitive theories of depression have attempted to account for this difference between the two populations. Beck (1967) has proposed that depression results from specific negative cognitive processes, among them a denial of personal responsibility of positive events and an exaggeration of personal responsibility for negative events. According to this theory, depressives would have a lower initial expectation of success than nondepressives and would exhibit a smaller increase in success expectancy following success and a larger decrease in success expectancy following failure. Seligman (1975) has proposed that depression results when an individual learns that responses and outcomes are independent of one another, and then makes negative, internal attributions about the cause of that independence. On the basis of Seligman's theory, one could conclude that since depressives see action and outcome as independent, they would shift success expectancy less following both success and failure.

Rights

In Copyright. URI: http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/ This Item is protected by copyright and/or related rights. You are free to use this Item in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights legislation that applies to your use. For other uses you need to obtain permission from the rights-holder(s).

Comments

If you are the rightful copyright holder of this dissertation or thesis and wish to have it removed from the Open Access Collection, please submit a request to pdxscholar@pdx.edu and include clear identification of the work, preferably with URL

Persistent Identifier

http://archives.pdx.edu/ds/psu/17853

Download

Share

COinS