Theories of Depression

Albert Bandura's Social Cognitive learning theory suggests that human beings are shaped by the interactions between their behaviors, thoughts, and environmental events. Human behavior ends up being largely be influences by what the person learns, which may occur by observation, as well as through direct experience. Depressed and non-depressed have different self-concepts. The depressed blame everything that goes wrong on them. They have a very low self esteem because they feel that they are unworthy of living. When something good happens they believe it was cause by an external factor because they aren’t good at all. Bandura also states that at some point these depressed people set their goals to high and do not get close to completing them so they fall into depression. They have low self-efficacy because they believe they are not able to control themselves. Repeated failure reduces self efficacy to a point that these depressed people no longer have goals in life because they believe they won’t reach them.

Julian B. Rotter’s theory of social learning, states that expectations are a crucial factor in social learning. Rotter claims that behavior is determined by two major types of "expectancy": the expected outcome of a behavior and the value a person places on that outcome. He described a general theory of personality with variables based on the ways human beings view their experiences. He believes that when people believe they can affect or influence a situation they feel they have an “internal” control over the event. When people feel they are under the influence of their environment and they can’t do anything to change a situation they have an external locus of control and thins generates a low self-esteem. People with depression have an external locus of control.

Martin Seligman, while working with classical conditioning, discovered new phenomena called Learned Helplessness. He put a dog into a huge box, next to it was another box and both boxes were divided by a small fence. In the boxes wee harmless electric shocks. When there was an electric shock the dog would jump to the other side. Then he did the same but this time put a collar around the dog’s neck to prevent him from passing to the other side. At first the dog would go crazy but after a while he learned that there was nothing to do but lay down and cry. When the same dog was put into the huge box without a collar and the shock would go on he had learned that nothing would prevent his harm so he did not jump to the other side and would lay down and cry. This shows us The theory of learned helplessness was then extended to human behavior, providing a model for explaining depression, a state characterized by a lack of affect and feeling. Depressed people became that way because they learned to be helpless. Depressed people learned that whatever they did is futile. During the course of their lives, depressed people apparently learned that they have no control.

Aaron Beck created a theory called Cognitive Therapy. Beck's cognitive therapy consists of lessoning psychological suffering through therapy. He believes the depressed are angry and take that anger inwards. This decisive approach permits the therapist and practitioner to value the integrative nature of cognitive behavior therapy. If people who are depressed can learn to combat self-doubts in the therapy session, they may be able to apply their newly acquired cognitive and behavioral skills in real-life settings. He strongly believes that depressive people have negative thinking and biased interpretation of events. The key to his therapy is to restructure the distorted beliefs in order to change dysfunctional behaviors.

http://www.helium.com/items/821843-aaron-becks-cognitive-therapy-approach-to-the-treatment-of-depression

http://www.learning-theories.com/social-learning-theory-bandura.html

http://psych.fullerton.edu/jmearns/rotter.htm

http://www.noogenesis.com/malama/discouragement/helplessness.html