Beck's cognitive triad: what is this theoretical model on depression?

Although there are many explanatory models for depression, the 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 so frequent among the population as is the depression.

• Related article: "Aaron Beck's Cognitive Therapy"

What is the Aaron Beck Cognitive Triad?

When we speak of 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 by three elements related to the belief system that are those that anticipate a possible depression in the individual. These elements would be negative thoughts towards himself, negative vision towards the world around him and hopeless thoughts regarding the future that is coming.

A totally bleak vision about the person himself, about his environment and about his future. That is Beck's cognitive triad, the three elements that the person sees in such an unfavorable way that their state mood is affected to the point of running the risk of being affected by the psychological illness of the 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 on the three elements that make up Beck's cognitive triad, his schemes are going to be oriented to collect only the stimuli that fit with that catastrophic vision of life. In other words, you are only going to see the negative side of everything that happens around you.

This will only give feedback to those same schemes, giving you more reason to believe in them and adding little to little in a depressive state that may worsen until the pathology of depression has fully developed. At this point, the person will probably need the help of a professional psychologist to be able to overcome this disorder and regain the state of mind you had before acquiring said pathology.

Cognitive distortions

We have seen that people affected by Beck's cognitive triad tend to use a number of biases that cause the individual to only capture negative information, thus delving into their state of it. We are going to delve more deeply into the types of cognitive distortions that occur during this process.

1. Overgeneralization

The first distortion that often falls into 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 surroundings 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 "or black or white", in which the subject does not realize that there is a whole gray scale in the central part, which houses a multitude of solutions to the question that worries him.

It is easy to detect this type of distortion, since the subjects who fall into them tend to always speak in total terms as all or nothing, always or never, all or none. The problem is that on many occasions there is a tendency to fall into a false dilemma, since it poses situations in which it has to decide between two options as if they were the only possible ones.

• You may be interested in: "Cognitive schemas: how is our thinking organized?"

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 a complete reasoning about the situation that occupies him, chooses to take 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 may consider that a certain behavior of another individual has been carried out with the intention of harming you, although in reality there is no objective element that try.

4. Magnification and minimization

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 earlier. In this case, the individual will tend to exaggerate, either in excess or in defect, 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 is going to magnify or minimize the characteristics of the event, generally making it bigger when it is negative towards him and making it smaller when it is positive, staying in this way with the feeling that, indeed, only bad things happen to him and when they are good they hardly have relevance in his life.

5. Selective abstraction

We have already been able to observe selective abstraction in the statements of other cognitive distortions related to Beck's cognitive triad, since it is actually an underlying mechanism to many of them. Consists in select only those elements of the information we receive that conform to our beliefs. In this case, it will be all those negative components that fit with the idea that everything in me is wrong, everything around me is wrong or everything that is yet 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 that this distortion is especially important in understanding the implications of the cognitive triad of Beck.

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 affect negatively to their person, although this relationship does not exist or is much more diffuse than they believe.

This mechanism is also known as false attribution, since individuals erroneously attribute the causality of an event to other people or even themselves, when the reality is very different and the event has been the consequence of another series of variables that are beyond the control of the person blamed unfairly.

Assessment of Beck's cognitive triad

Once we are clear about what Beck's cognitive triad consists of and what are the cognitive mechanisms that underlying this theory, one wonders how we can value or evaluate these elements in a person in concrete. For this the author developed the Beck Depression Inventory, also known as BDI or BDI-II, in its most up-to-date version.

This tool is a questionnaire made up of 21 items before which the subject must choose the grade in that each statement fits him, from not at all to totally (there are four degrees in all). Through the responses, the psychologist will be able to obtain information about the elements of Beck's cognitive triad that more are being affected in this person and therefore estimate how severe is the depression that he is suffering.

It is an extremely useful tool, as it requires very little application time (usually 15 minutes is more than enough) and can also be self-administered person. The most important thing is the valuable information that it provides to the professional, who thanks to the results and its Clinical observation will be able to assess the direction to be taken in therapy aimed at achieving the greatest possible improvement in the patient.

It is not the only scale designed to assess 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). In addition, 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.

Bibliographic references:

• Beck, A.T. (1963). Thinking and depression: I. Idiosyncratic content and cognitive distortions. Archives of general psychiatry.
• Beck, A.T., Rush, A.J., Shaw, B.F., Emery, G. (1979). Cognitive therapy of depression. Guilford clinical psychology and psychotherapy series.
• Beckham, E.E., Leber, W.R., Watkins, J.T., Boyer, J.L., Cook, J.B. (1986). Development of an instrument to measure Beck's cognitive triad: The Cognitive Triad Inventory. Journal of consulting and Clinical Psychology.
• Kaslow, N.J., Stark, K.D., Printz, B., Livingston, R., Ling Tsai, S. (1992). Cognitive Triad Inventory for Children: Development and relation to depression and anxiety. Journal of Clinical Child Psychology. Taylor & Francis.