Lecture 2.4: Psychological Etiology of Mood Disorders

Self-propagatory Processes (Tom Joiner)

Negative Feedback-seeking:

• Tendency towards relationships that provide negative feedback

• Patient’s desire for self-verification

Excessive Reassurance-seeking:

• Constant need for positive evaluation (i.e., low self-esteem)

• Possible risk factor for future symptoms

• Disturbs social environment

Interpersonal Conflict Avoidance:

• Lack of assertiveness, avoidance

• Social withdrawal/submissiveness

Stressful events as a etiology (cause)

Stressful life events often precede the onset of mood disorders.

Stress generation: symptoms of mood disorders cause stressful life events

Learned helplessness theory (Seligman, 1965)

• Uncontrollable negative events most likely to lead to depression.

  • Can cause:

    • Low motivation

    • Helplessness

    • Passive behavior in the face of adversity

Stressful events:

• Eighty percent of people reported negative life event prior to a depressive episode.

• Individuals with depression are more likely to have chronic stressors (e.g., financial strain).

Depressogenic Attributional Style

Occurs when individuals attribute negative events to stable, global, and internal factors

Some features:

• Low self-worth/self-esteem

• Belief that what happens is uncontrollable

• Expectation of future uncontrollable events

• Sense of helplessness and hopelessness

Depressive schema

• A depressive schema is a risk factor for developing depression in the face of “failure” events.

• A schema is an expectation for how things work in the world (Beck, 1976).

• Beck’s Negative Triad of Depression: negative thoughts about the self, the world, and the future.

Attentional Biases

Individuals with depression often have difficulty disengaging from negative stimuli.

They also may experience biased memory for negative events/concepts.

• Example: If you told people to memorize this list of words, people with depression would remember more negative words:

  • Acceptance

  • Vomit

  • Achievement

  • Poison

  • Useless

  • Success

Mania Etiology (causes)

Expressed emotion:

• Expressed emotion (EE) refers to critical, hostile, or emotionally overinvolved attitudes that relatives hold toward a family member with a psychiatric illness.

Life events:

• Goal-attainment often precedes manic episodes.

Individuals with the following traits tend to be more likely to experience manic episodes:

• Autonomy-seeking

• Perfectionistic

• Goal-striving

True or False? A depressogenic attributional style occurs when individuals attribute negative events to internal, global, and stable factors.

True