Cognitive therapy and its variants traditionally identify ten cognitive distortions that maintain negative thinking and help to maintain negative emotions. Eliminating these distortions and negative thought is said to improve mood and discourage maladies such as depression and chronic anxiety. The process of learning to refute these distortions is called "cognitive restructuring".
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- All-or-nothing thinking - thinking of things in absolute terms, like "always", "every" or "never". Few aspects of human behavior are so absolute.
- Overgeneralization - taking isolated cases and using them to make wide, usually self-deprecating generalizations.
- Mental filter - Focusing exclusively on certain, usually negative or upsetting, aspects of something while ignoring the rest, like a tiny imperfection in a piece of clothing.
- Disqualifying the positive - continually "shooting down" positive experiences for arbitrary, ad hoc reasons. (See special pleading).
- Jumping to conclusions - assuming something negative where there
is actually no evidence to support it. Two specific subtypes are
also identified:
- Mind reading - assuming the intentions of others
- Fortune telling - guessing that things will turn out badly.
- Magnification and Minimization - exaggerating negatives and
understating positives. Often the positive characteristics of
other people are exaggerated and negatives understated. There
is one subtype of magnification:
- Catastrophizing - thinking that a situation is unbearable or impossible when it is really just uncomfortable.
- Emotional reasoning - making decisions and arguments based on how you feel rather than objective reality.
- Making should statements - concentrating on what you think "should" or ought to be rather than the actual situation you are faced with.
- Labelling - related to overgeneralization, explaining by naming. Rather than describing the specific behavior, you assign a label to someone or yourself that puts them in absolute and unalterable terms.
- Personalization (or attribution) - Assuming you or others directly
caused things when that may not have been the case.
