Cognitive Distortion (Research Paper Sample)

Cognitive Distortion
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Question One
Types of Cognitive Distortions
Cognitive distortions involve several ways through which the mind of a person will convince them of a thing that in reality is not true. In other words, cognitive distortions are the inaccurate thoughts that lead to a person having negative thinking as well as emotions. It is these cognitive distortions that are responsible for making people feel bad about themselves and even leads to the loss of self-esteem. For instance, a person may tell themselves that "I always fail at everything”. This means that the mind of such a person has convinced them that they cannot succeed in everything that they engage in. In case such a person fails in doing one thing, this confirms that they are failures as per their minds, and therefore, they end up failing in everything else that they do. A person with cognitive distortions can be helped to overcome this condition by a therapist through psychotherapy. There are various types of cognitive distortions as indicated in the reading. This paper will provide an analysis of ten common types of cognitive distortions.1) FilteringThis is a type of cognitive distortion in which a person takes and magnifies the negative details while at the same time filtering the positive aspect of a given situation. A person who is suffering from this type of cognitive distortion will pick out a specific and unpleasant detail in a situation, and then they will dwell in this unpleasant detail such that making their vision for the reality to become distorted or darkened (Lu, & Yeo, 2015).2) Polarised ThinkingThis type of cognition distortion is also referred to as the ‘Black and White’ thinking. In this thinking, a person literally sees things as either ‘black’ or ‘white’. This means that in such a person, there are only two options involved, to be perfect, or to be a failure. There is no middle ground between the two options. Therefore, in case the performance of the person falls slightly below the ‘perfect’ mark, the person will consider themselves as a total failure.3) OvergeneralizationIn this type of cognitive distortion, people make conclusions that are based on a single incident. The decision may also be based on a single piece of evidence. If something bad happens in a person’s life only once, such a person will expect the same thing to happen over and over in their life. People who suffer from this type of cognitive distortion have a tendency of viewing a single unpleasant thing as a part of a continuous pattern of defeat (Burns, 2011).4) Jumping to conclusionsThis distortion makes people conclude about other people, why they act in a certain way, or how they feel, without them having explained themselves. This is the reason why a person may conclude that another person is negative about them while they don’t care to find out whether they are really right in their conclusion.5) CatastrophizingThis cognitive distortion is also referred to as magnifying or minimizing distortion. This cognitive distortion makes people expect disaster will happen in their life all the time. A person always uses the "what if" question whenever an event occurred. For instance, a person may think like, ‘What if tragedy strikes?’ ‘What if it happens to me?’6) PersonalizationA person who has this type of distortion will always think that other people’s actions and what they say is a direct attack on them. This distortion also makes a person compare themselves with other people with an aim of determining who is smarter, who is better looking among others. A person with this type of distortion may take themselves as responsible for a given unhealthy external event and that in a real sense they are not responsible for (Burns, 2011).7) Control FallaciesUnder this cognitive distortion, a person may feel that they are externally controlled. Such a person may take themselves as being helpless, and even consider themselves as victims of fate. In some other instance, a person may suffer from the fallacies of internal control. In this case, the person takes responsibility for the happiness or sadness of the people that are around them (Burns, 2011).8) Fallacy of FairnessThis distortion makes a person get resentful for they think that they know what is supposed to be fair but gets disagreement from other people. This mentality is usually attributed to the fact that parents and other people always tell a child when growing up that "life is not fair”. This makes the person grow up knowing that bad things will always happen t...