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Major Depressive Disorder
- depression is a disabling disorder that is associated with:
- substantial emotional misery
- severe interpersonal disruption
- increased risk for physical illness and health
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what is an intrapsychic disorder
- it exists within the mind or psyche
- however, it can significantly disrupt the lives of those who are close to the sufferer
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who were the first to associate psychological/emotional factors with depression?
abraham and freud
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Gender Differences in Depression
- women are at a much higher risk for depression
- average female to male ratio = 2:1
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Age Effects on Depression
- appears more commonly in younger than older adults
- younger generations are more prone to it
- rates seem to be increasing most quickly in young men
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Models of Depression
- life event model
- behavioral model
- cognitive model
- interpersonal model
- attribution-based model
- evolutionary models
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Evolutionary model of Depression
- nature’s way of telling you you’re barking up the wrong tree
- those prone to depression out-reproduced those who did not
- it serves as a negotiating tool to extract investment from others — post-partum depression
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Depression Threshold
- experience depression only at functional times (ex. death of a loved one vs parking ticket)
- those with clinical depression may have too sensitive of a threshold
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Depressive Realism
- people who are depressed have lower opinion of themselves and their prospects of success
- this assessment is more accurate, which helps us cut our losses and be more realistic
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Life Event Models — severe events vs less severe events
- severe — events with marked or moderate long term threat -> related to onset of a depressive disorder
- less severe — insufficient to elicit depression
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Life Event Models — additivity effects
- severe life events have a greater effect if they are summed
- less severe life events are insufficient to elicit depression even if they are summed
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Life Event Models — kindling
- early occurrences of depression increase neurobiological sensitization
- to the point where recurrent episodes are largely initiated by these neurobiological processes
- in extreme versions, depression becomes autonomous and occurs independent of life stress
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Life Event Models — stress sensitization model
- a major event is needed to trigger a first onset
- less severe life events can initiate recurrent episodes
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Behavioral Models — response-contingent positive reinforcement + social skills
- behavioral responses extinguish when individuals fail to receive positive reinforcement for them
- loss of positive reinforcement leads to dysphoria
- individuals with depression have poor social skills -> they are denied access to the reinforcing properties of social relationships
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Interpersonal Model of Depression
- stressful life events lead to a display of depressive symptoms
- these symptoms function to restore social support and gain reassurance regarding their self worth and acceptance
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Beck’s Cognitive Theory of Depression
- depression results from activation of depressive self-schema
- those with depression have dysfunctional schemas that lead to negative thoughts about the self, world, and the future = cognitive triad
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5 Cognitive Distortions
- all-or-nothing thinking— when situations are viewed in only two categories instead of an a continuum
- selective abstraction — when negative details are focused on without taking into consideration the entire context
- overgeneralization — sweeping judgements or predictions based on a single incident
- emotional reasoning — one thinks something must be true because on feels it to be so
- personalization — when the individual takes responsibility for the negative actions of others without considering more plausible explanations for their behaviors
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Attribution-Based Model of Depression
- focused on depressed person’s expectations that they are helpless
- learned helplessness theory
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Attribution-Based Model — pos. vs neg. events
- positive events — specific unstable, external attributes
- negative events — global, stable, and internal attributions, vulnerability factor to depression
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