Beck’s Cognitive Triad: What Is This Theoretical Model Of Depression?
Although there are many explanatory models for depression, that of Beck’s cognitive triad It is probably the most important of all.
We will review all the concepts involved in this author’s approach and the role that these three elements play within the global theory that he developed as a way to explain a psychological pathology as common among the population as depression.
When we talk about Beck’s cognitive triad we are referring to the core of an important theory developed in 1976 by the author Aaron Temkin Beck, an American psychiatrist. The concept is the main element of the cognitive theory of depression a model designed by Beck to try to explain and predict the causes of this pathology.
Therefore, Beck’s cognitive triad, which is also known as the negative cognitive triad, would be made up of three elements related to the belief system that anticipate possible depression in the individual. These elements would be negative thoughts towards himself, a negative view of the world around him and hopeless thoughts about the approaching future.
A totally bleak vision of oneself, one’s surroundings and one’s future. That is Beck’s cognitive triad, the three elements that the person views in such an unfavorable light that his or her mood is affected to the point of being at risk of being affected by the psychological illness of depression.
Why is this happening? Due to the schemes that people use to filter all the information that constantly reaches us. In the case of a person with a negative view of the three elements that make up Beck’s cognitive triad, Their schemes will be aimed at collecting only the stimuli that fit with that catastrophic vision of life. In other words, you will only see the negative side of everything that happens around you.
This will only feed back into those same schemes, giving you more reasons to believe in them and gradually plunging you into a depressive state that may worsen until you have fully developed the pathology of depression. At this point, the person will probably need the help of a professional psychologist to be able to overcome said disorder and recover the state of mind they had before acquiring said pathology.
We have seen that people affected by Beck’s cognitive triad tend to use a series of biases that cause the individual to only capture negative information, thus delving into their state. Let’s delve deeper into the types of cognitive distortions that occur during this process.
1. Overgeneralization
The first distortion that usually falls into and that affects Beck’s cognitive triad is overgeneralization. The name is quite descriptive in itself. What the person tends to do is take an isolated event (of a negative nature) as an example of what always happens. as a way of justifying that all the events concerning him, his environment or his future, are hopeless.
2. Dichotomous thinking
These people also tend to fall into dichotomous thinking, that is, to consider that there are only two extreme options regarding a given issue , instead of stopping to think if there are intermediate possibilities that are not so catastrophic. It is the classic “either black or white”, in which the subject does not realize that there is a whole scale of gray in the central part, which houses a multitude of solutions to the question that concerns him.
It is easy to detect this type of distortions, since the subjects who fall into them tend to always speak in total terms such as all or nothing, always or never, all or none. The problem is that on many occasions we tend to fall into a false dilemma, since it poses situations in which you have to decide between two options as if they were the only ones possible.
3. Arbitrary inferences
Beck’s cognitive triad can also be made worse by arbitrary inferences. These cognitive distortions imply that the subject, instead of carrying out complete reasoning about the situation at hand, chooses to make a shortcut and establish a hasty conclusion that is generally negative, either towards him, towards some element of his environment or towards his future prospects.
Through arbitrary inferences, a person can consider that a certain behavior of another individual has been carried out with the intention of harming him, even though in reality there is no objective element to prove it.
Other of the most frequent biases that depressed people use and that therefore have to do with Beck’s cognitive triad are those of magnification or minimization. They are related to that dichotomous thinking that we saw previously. In this case, the individual will tend to exaggerate, whether excessively or insufficiently, the characteristics of a certain event, always in the direction that is negative towards it.
Here you can also observe the catastrophic vision, since the person will magnify or minimize the characteristics of the event, generally making it larger when it is negative towards him and making it smaller when it is positive, thus leaving with the feeling that Indeed, only bad things happen to him and when they are good they barely have any relevance in his life.
5. Selective abstraction
We have already been able to observe selective abstraction in the approaches to other cognitive distortions related to Beck’s cognitive triad, since it is actually an underlying mechanism for many of them. Consists in select only those elements of the information we receive that fit our beliefs. In this case they will be all those negative components that fit with the idea that everything in me is bad, everything around me is bad or everything that is to come is bad.
As we can see, it is one of the main ideas that Beck raises in his cognitive theory of depression, so this distortion is especially important when it comes to understanding the implications of Beck’s cognitive triad.
6. Personalization
The last of the cognitive distortions that we are going to review is that of personalization, a frequent phenomenon by which individuals who suffer from depression seem to tend to attribute certain phenomena to themselves or to the people around them. That is, they think that they (or other people) are directly responsible for events that negatively affect them, even though such a relationship does not exist or is much more diffuse than they believe.
This mechanism is also known as false attribution, since individuals actually wrongly attribute the causality of an event to other people or even to themselves, when reality is very different and the event has been a consequence of another series of variables that escape. to the control of the person unfairly blamed.
Assessment of Beck’s Cognitive Tria
Once we are clear about what Beck’s cognitive triad consists of and what the cognitive mechanisms underlying this theory are, it is worth asking how we can assess or evaluate these elements in a specific person. For this the author developed the Beck Depression Inventory, also known as BDI or BDI-II, in its most updated version.
This tool is a questionnaire made up of 21 items before which the subject must choose the degree to which each statement fits them, from not at all to completely (there are four degrees in total). Through the answers, the psychologist will be able to obtain information about the elements of Beck’s cognitive triad that are being most affected in this person and therefore estimate how serious the depression he is suffering is.
It is an extremely useful tool, as it requires very little application time (generally 15 minutes is more than enough) and can also be self-administered by the person themselves. The most important thing is the valuable information it provides to the professional, who thanks to the results and his clinical observation will be able to assess the direction to take in the therapy aimed at achieving the greatest possible improvement in the patient.
It is not the only scale designed to evaluate Beck’s cognitive triad. Beckham and his collaborators created the Cognitive Triad Inventory, or CTI, in 1986. This tool has 30 questions, 10 for each of the elements of the triad (the person, the world and the future). Furthermore, Kaslow decided in 1992 to make an adaptation to be able to apply this scale to the child population, thus creating the CTI-C. In this case it has 36 items.
