Theory of Depression

Abert Bandura’s theory is that social cognitive learning theory suggested that people are shaped by the interactions between their behaviors, thoughts, and eviormental events. He also pointed out that depressed people’s self-concepts are different from non-depressed people's self-concepts. Depressed people tend to hold themselves solely responsible for bad things in their lives and are full of self-recrimination and self-blame. In contrast, successes tend to get viewed as having been caused by external factors outside of the depressed person's control. Repeated failure further reduces feelings of self-efficacy and leads to depression.

The main idea in Julian Rotter's social learning theory is that personality represents an interaction of the individual with his or her environment. One cannot speak of a personality, internal to the individual, that is independent of the environment. Neither can one focus on behavior as being an automatic response to an objective set of environmental stimuli. to understand behavior, one must take both the individual and the environment into account. He has four main components to his thory that are Behavior Potential. Behavior potential is the likelihood of engaging in a particular behavior in a specific situation. Expectancy. Expectancy is the subjective probability that a given behavior will lead to a particular outcome, or reinforcer. Psychological Situation. Although the psychological situation does not figure directly into Rotter's formula for predicting behavior, Rotter believes it is always important to keep in mind that different people interpret the same situation differently. Generality versus Specificity. An important dimension of personality theories is the generality versus specificity of its constructs.

Aaron Beck is an American psychiatrist who has pioneered research on psychotherapy, psychopathology, suicide and psychometrics and developed the cognitive therapy. He became interested in psychiatry during an internship at the Rhode Island hospital, where he studied neurology as a specialty. Aaron Beck is considered as the father of cognitive behavioral therapy. According to Beck,"If beliefs do not change, there is no improvement. If beliefs change, symptoms change. Beliefs function as little operational units," which means that one's thoughts and beliefs affect one’ s behavior and subsequent actions. He believed that dysfunctional behavior is caused due to dysfunctional thinking, and that thinking is shaped by our beliefs. Our beliefs decide the course of our actions. Beck was convinced of positive results if patients could be persuaded to think constructively and forsake negative thinking. This is according to buzzle.com.


Martin E. P. "Marty" Seligman is an American psychologist and author of self-help books. His theory of "learned helplessness" is widely respected among scientific psychologists. He is the director of the Positive Psychology Center at the University of Pennsylvania. Seligman's foundational experiments and theory of "learned helplessness" began at University of Pennsylvania in 1967, as an extension of his interest in depression. Quite by accident, Seligman and colleagues discovered that the conditioning of dogs led to outcomes that were opposite to the predictions of B.F. Skinner's behaviorism, then a leading psychological theory. Seligman developed the theory further, finding learned helplessness to be a psychological condition in which a human being or an animal has learned to act or behave helplessly in a particular situation - usually after experiencing some inability to avoid an adverse situation - even when it actually has the power to change its unpleasant or even harmful circumstance. Seligman saw a similarity with severely depressed patients, and argued that clinical depression and related mental illnesses result in part from a perceived absence of control over the outcome of a situation.