people as a depressive cognitive triad (Beck, 1972). That is, depressed people
typically have negative thoughts about themselves, are pessimistic about the
future, and tend to interpret ongoing experiences in a negative manner.
Many psychologists look for clues about the causes and treatment of de-
pression by examining the way people perceive, organize, and recall emotion-ally laden information (Rusting, 1998). Among other questions, these
investigators want to know if some people are prone to depression because
of the way they process information. We ’ll look at two concepts investigators
use in this research —depressive schemas and negative cognitive style.
Depressive Schemas
Each day we encounter some good events, a few bad events, and an occa-sional incident with ambiguous emotional meaning. Which ones will you
think about today and which will you ignore? From a cognitive perspective,
the happiest people are those who pay attention to the positive information,
dismiss the negative information, and interpret the ambiguous information as
positively as possible. In fact, most of us have an unrealistically positive out-
look on life (Taylor, 1989). We believe we are better than most at almosteverything we do, certain that good things will happen to us, and convinced
unfortunate events happen to other people. Because most of us look at life
through rose-colored glasses, we remain content and in good psychologicalhealth (Alloy & Abramson, 1988).
Unfortunately, many people look at life through glasses that are tinted
blue. Psychologists from a cognitive perspective say that depressed peopleprocess information through an active depressive schema (Clark et al., 1999;
Kuiper & Derry, 1981; Kuiper, MacDonald, & Derry, 1983). A depressive
schema is a cognitive structure containing memories about and associations
with depressing events and thoughts. People processing information through
this schema attend to negative information, ignore positive information, and
interpret ambiguous information in a depressing way. They also recall de-
pressing memories easily and often associate current sad experiences with sad
incidents from their past. In short, depressed people are set to process informa-
tion in a way that keeps negative thoughts prominent and positive thoughts
away. Little wonder, then, that these people remain depressed.
Researchers have developed a number of procedures to study depressive
schemas. Along with clinical observations about how depressed people thinkand act, these experiments provide an impressive body of evidence pointing
to the role of cognitive structures in the development and maintenance of de-
pression. Much of the evidence for depressive schemas comes from studies
employing the self-schema research techniques described in the previous chap-
ter. Researchers sometimes ask depressed and nondepressed individuals to an-
swer questions about a series of words. In one study, depressed patientsresponded to a list of adjectives by pressing a YES or a NO button to indicate
if the word described them (Derry & Kuiper, 1981). Half the words were re-
lated to depression (for example, bleak, dismal, helpless ), and half were not.
The researchers then surprised the participants by giving them 3 minutes to
recall as many of the words as they could.446 CHAPTER 16 The Cognitive Approach