The Relationship Between Cognitive Bias And Depressive Disorder

The depressive disorder is a kind of affective mental disease characterized by decreased emotions and moods significantly and longtime. It was caused by multiple social, biological, and psychological factors, whereas the pathogenesis of depressive syndromes remains to be determined. Along with the development of psycho-etiological research, it was focused on cognitive biases or vulnerability or maladaptive cognitive patterns by many foreign scholars. A variety of theories and models have been proposed to account for the relationships and a lot of studies have been made to validate the results. But what and how the cognitive biases . worked, as well as which is the cause and which is the result, the findings regarding the relation between cognitive biases and depression in their studies is still unclear. Several researchers in our country had made a little progress recently, the results were also unclear similar to the foreigner's, due to the complexity of the depressive patients' cognitive biases, especially limitations of methods, tools or instruments. Therefore, it is necessary to explore the inherence relationships between cognitive biases and unipolar depressive disorder and to give a more well-grounded explanation to this inconsistency through a number of empirical studies.Subjects were 767 university students and 265 depressive patients drawn from a university and five hospitals in Shanxi province. The purpose of this research was to study the relationships between cognitive biases and depression by interview, questionnaire investigation and experiment method. Three studies were conducted in this paper.The first part, adopting structural interview and questionnaire method, we revised the Stress Appraisal Measure (SAM) on the basis of Chinese traditional culture, which was used widely at stress appraisal aspect in the foreign countries.In the second part, we discussed the correlation between the variables of cognitive biases and depressive syndromes by using structural interview and questionnaire methods to collect data and structural equation modeling (SEM) to confirm the inherence logical relationships. We verified the mediating effect of cognitive biases and dispositional optimism respectively on the relationships between stress and depressive syndromes, cognitive biases between dispositional optimism and depressive syndromes, as well as attributional style and cognitive appraisal respectively between dysfunctional attitude and depressive syndromes by analyzing structure equation models.At the third section, focusing on the cognitive biases we made a clinical interventional experiment of cognitive-behavioral treatment on the basic of medications to explore the inherence relationships between cognitive biases and clinical recovery of depressive patients.Through the empirical studies, we obtained several findings as followings:(1) The reliability and validity of revised SAM were good not only for university students but also for depressive patients. SAM could be used as an effective cognitive appraisal tool in psychological research.(2) Stress had been associated with depressive disorder. Stress could predict negatively depressive disorder's positive affect and positively predict negative affect. As a kind of maladaptive cognitive patterns, dysfunctional attitude, negative event attributional style, and secondary appraisal, as well as dispositional optimism medicated partly the effect between stress and depressive symptoms of positive affect and negative affect.(3) Dispositional optimism had also been associated with depressive disorder. Dispositional optimism could predict negatively dysfunctional attitude, negative event attributional style, and primary appraisal, as well as depressive disorder's negative affect and positively predict secondary appraisal and positive affect. Dysfunctional attitude was a partial mediator between dispositional optimism and negative affect of depressive symptoms. Negative event attributional style was a full mediator between dispositional optimism and depressive symptoms' negative affect and positive affect. Primary appraisal was a full mediator between dispositional optimism and negative affect of depressive symptoms, whereas secondary appraisal was a full mediator between dispositional optimism and depressive symptoms' negative affect and positive affect.(4) As for the links between dysfunctional attitude and depressive disorder, dysfunctional attitude could positively predict negative event attributional style, primary appraisal, and depressive disorder's negative affect, as well as negatively predict secondary appraisal. Negative event attributional style fully mediated dysfunctional attitude and depressive syndrome including Hamilton's depressive symptoms and negative affect and positive affect. Primary appraisal partly mediated dysfunctional attitude and negative affect of depressive symptoms, whereas secondary appraisal partly mediated dysfunctional attitude and positive affect of depressive symptoms.(5) The groups of conventional medications and psychotherapies associated with conventional medications could all improve depressive symptoms and significantly enhance depressive patients' neuropsychological and neurophysiological functions, but the factors of retardation and the time of double word decreased significantly in associated group than medication group, the functions of speech and notice and amplitude of P3a and P3b increased significantly in associated group than medication group. So the therapeutic effectiveness of the latter was better than the former's.(6) The therapeutic effectiveness of the psychotherapies associated with conventional medications was better than the conventional medications in reforming depressive patients' cognitive biases, such as the factors of stressfulness, uncontrollable, frangibility, reliability decreased significantly in associated group than medication group, the factor of positive permanence increased significantly in associated group than medication group. But the associated group was not significant in reforming depressive patients' dispositional optimism than the medication group.