Engles (1977) proposed a model merging the psychological and social as a science with the biological, providing a more expansive multi-disciplinary lens. This proved acceptance for psychological theories to propose models. Of course, by improving research protocols (Alloy et al., 1999; Licinio & Wong, 2020), though with inevitable scepticism and fraught with limitations as conclusions were drawn (Benning, 2015; Ghaemi, 2010), overall, broadening insight into affective disorders and the development of their symptoms (Fu et al., 2021; Remes et al., 2021). The main fault with theoretical models is that they try to explain too much (Fried, 2020); “The methodological implication for psychology is this: If you want to have an argument about cognitive architecture, you have to specify the level of analysis that’s supposed to be at issue.” (Fodor & Pylyshyn, 1988, p.9).
Depressive symptoms tend to clump together and co-occur (Zahn et al., 2015; Zimmerman et al., 2018), creating a distinct depressive profile, a core set of symptoms that are represented as present or absent leading to the argued heterogeneous mathematical syndrome (Østergaard et al., 2011) though without any acknowledged credence to diagnostic specifiers and clinical subtypes (e.g., Abramson et al., 1989; Stanghellini, 2023). Undoubtedly related, the continuity of depression has been and will be an ongoing debate (Flett et al., 1997): Are clinical and non-clinical manifestations of depression quantitatively on the same spectrum, separated by severity, or are the two qualitatively unique from each other? While the scope of this essay does not contribute directly to these discussions, it is a means of introducing the underlying pair of assumptions within the psychological models: Might the development of depressive symptoms be attributable to similar contextual stimuli also exposed to normal pathology, though through dysfunctional cognitive processes, appraised maladaptively and inappropriately?
Psychological models provide subjective contextualisation, characterising the individuals’ development and interaction with their symptoms. The Cognitive Theory/Model (Beck, 1963) and the Revised Learned Helplessness Model (Abramson et al., 1978) of depression posit that negative beliefs and overgeneralised attributions and appraisals of events contribute to negative affect. The issue this paper aims to address is how individuals form negative beliefs about their future, attributing outcomes to internal and stable causal factors and how that overwhelming sense of hopelessness affects future self-representations. Moreover, when formulating potential outcomes from any engagement with the environment, what we hope—or lack thereof—when comprised of overgeneralised expectancies and negatively selected evidence generates an abstract and vague future self-representation. Through the lens of Cognitive Theory and the Learned Helplessness model, what are the conditions for hopelessness to manifest, and how does hopelessness affect goal-formulations?
Goal pursuit is a central feature of the human experience (see Klinger, 1977 for an expansive account): it is how we create meaning through incentives and identity formation. As defined in the social sciences, hope is an analogue of goal-directed thinking (Snyder, 1994). In this way, Snyder and colleagues measured hope as a cognitive construct considering how and if one’s behaviour can satisfy a future goal (Snyder et al., 1991). It is a thought-out procedure of steps or actions necessary to achieve a goal (i.e., pathways thinking) and to what extent the individual has the capacity to meet the criteria in the proposed plan (i.e., agency thinking). Beck and colleagues (1974) devised a Hopelessness Scale that drew from pessimistic and negative attitudes about one’s future. The defining features of hopelessness are consistent with negative self-referential statements of future self-efficacy: “My future seems dark to me; It is unlikely that I will get any real satisfaction in the future; There is no use in really trying to get something I want because I probably will not get it” (see Marchetti, 2018 for network analysis). Though with slightly different aims, both scales adhere to a cognitively constructed phenomenon: a conglomeration of self-referential cognitions about the future. Though, is the absence of hope equal to hopelessness?
Huen and colleagues (2015) emphasised that Beck’s (1974) scale measured an overgeneralised negative attitude about future events, non-specific to goal-pursuit, and Snyder’s (1991) hope scale levied motivation and ability to generate a plan in pursuit of a goal, concluding that they are better off as separate constructs. However, they found that the agency component weighted significantly more with Beck’s scale than Snyder’s measure of pathways thinking, implying that hopelessness can also be thought of as predominantly diminished motivation and the absence of any specific plan. This is consistent with Dickson & Moberly (2013) highlighting the abstract and generalised personal goals depressed patients formulate, responding to written prompts about potential approach and avoidance goals, concluding that depressed patients formulate less specific goals overall, regardless of when approach or avoidant-oriented, though report a higher number of avoidance goals. Depressed patients report having similar ratings of goal importance (Dickson et al., 2011) and, tenuously, an intact future self-representation (Johnson et al., 2010). However, how might an overgeneralised and unspecific goal structure interrelate with hopelessness?
We propose that the tendency to generalise personal goals is a consequence of internal, stable, and global attributions increasing the expectancy of attaining undesired outcomes in the future (Abramson et al., 1978). Moreover, negative self-schemas influencing selective information processing and the tendency to ruminate over inappropriately misperceived information contribute to unspecific but valued personal goals (Beck, 1963). For example, a personal approach goal may look like, “I want to be happy” or “I want to improve my social connections with close family members by calling them each night.” Although they are the same goal in essence, the former is a less specific form of the latter because it provides no detail for how to attain the goal of “being happy.” We speculate that the absence of motivated specificity in approach goal-directed behaviour is a sufficient consequence of hopelessness, while goal importance persists, developing an exchange in energy (e.g., behavioural, cognitive) directed to avoidant goal attainment. For example, a personal avoidance goal may look like, “I want to avoid loneliness” or “I want to avoid letting my relationship with family members become distant when moving away.” Interestingly, Dickson & Moberly (2013) measured the specific reasons for (i.e., reasons why this would be accomplished/avoided)or against (i.e., reasons why this would not be accomplished/avoided) the goals listed, finding that in depressed patients, the reasons listed for the attainment of avoidance goals were specific despite the avoidance goals themselves being vague and unspecific: They were certain of attaining avoidance goals, so they specified how they would go about attaining them. How does the development of hopelessness affect specifying what one hopes to avoid but is certain will occur?
Rotter (1966) classified the tendency to attribute an internal or external locus of controllability to an event and its outcome either as a consequence of something “I” did or as a consequence of something outside of “myself.” According to Forsyth (1980), attributions are used to achieve a degree of control over ranging experiences—expectancies refine future potential contingencies by making the uncertainty a more predictable certainty (Horwitz et al., 2016). However, perceived control over the outcome is not the only necessary and sufficient dimension contributing to hopelessness. Abramson and colleagues (1978) revised the Learned Helplessness Model (Seligman & Maier, 1967), proposing a separation: personal helplessness and universal helplessness. An attribution placed on available behaviour, either as something relevant others (e.g., if in 7th grade, doing math coursework, relevant others are 7th graders in the same course) have the capacity of doing (i.e., personal) or something no relevant other has capable behaviour for fulfilling (i.e., universal). Attributed as a stable factor about themselves, personally helpless individuals will have lower self-esteem than those who make unstable and external attributions about their behaviour in context. As events continue to occur, a matrix of typically internal, stable, and global attributions placed on the resulting outcome infers the likelihood that hopelessness develops (Abramson et al., 1989). However, cognitions are at the crux of the attributions, which facilitate the layering and construction of meaning on experience (Clark & Beck, 1999).
There is a fundamental, systematic error occurring within the cognitive milieu of the depressed patient. That error seems to be that the depressed individual has a bias against themselves (Beck, 1963). Cognition is the interaction of context and belief, comprising the structure, process, and product of appraised information (Clark & Beck, 1999). This shapes future interpretations of attributed causal sequences, which must be sensed as meaningful to the individual; otherwise, it escapes sensory awareness (Ingram & Kendall, 1986). The depressed individual presents idiosyncratic schematic content containing dysfunctional or maladaptive beliefs or attitudes about themselves, their environment, and the future (Beck, 1967). Typical cognitive distortions include arbitrary inference, overgeneralisation, and selective abstraction (Beck, 1963). Hopelessness manifests as a layering tint, skewing self-concepts with these distortions, embedded within a larger-scale negative self-schema; the process of accumulating meaningful experiences and characterising them with pessimistic attitudes, prominently exemplified by such statements as there is no point (Beck et al., 1974; Markus, 1977; Segal & Muran, 1993). Here, we speculate that because meaning is layered onto experience, the hopeless individual attributes internal, stable, and global negative evaluations about themselves, their personality, and across event domains, negatively filtering their prior experiences to construct vague future self-representations.
The perceived failure to attain abstract goals is likely because of the instability and non-specific nature of the goal itself (Emmons, 1992). Abstract (i.e., unspecific) goals tend to be higher-order—ultimate goals that typically have smaller-order goals underneath, which have a more specific essence, usually involving more detail with actionable steps (Locke & Latham, 2002). Beck (1967) stated that depressed patients focus on negative events due to their negative self-referential schematic organisation, theorising the tendency to focus on inappropriate evidence where obscuring other relevant information and selectively picking out evidence (i.e., selective abstraction) that confirms their belief of attaining future negative events as a condition of their depressogenic schematic structure (Greenberg & Beck, 1989; Ingram et al., 1994). While negatively tainting evidence via selective information processing (Ingram et al., 1995), we theorise that the specificity in attaining avoidance goals derives from the overabundance of negatively skewed, easily accessed cognitive content then blanketed across self-referential domains (e.g., romantic, professional, intrapersonal) (as seen in global—specific attributions; Abramson et al., 1978).
If, then, we believe we have the available behaviour that will facilitate that attainment of what we are trying to avoid, the schematic content (specificity) is to attain what we hope to avoid (see Rosario-Williams et al., 2022 for the absence of positive events), then the only available mental representation is pulled from the negative pool within that schema (Ingram et al., 1994); negative schema activation. The specificity derives from the mental imagery of playing out the repertoire of available behaviour (Reiser et al., 1985; Mischel & Shoda, 1995); if the mental image is of certain failure (Clark, 1986), then the ability to specify how we would go about attaining what we hope to avoid is specific (presented as certainty in Anderson & Lyon, 1986). For instance, if the goal “to be happy” is presented with an obstacle, say, being rejected by a potential romantic partner, the depressed patient is likely to interpret that they attained “being unhappy.” Moreover, attributions are placed on outcomes, such as “I have no capable behaviour that helps my goal of being happy, then it must be something within me that is incapable of being happy.” We can safely extend this to the motivational deficit of goal specificity and say that under this attributional concoction (i.e., hopelessness), there is no use in specifying behaviour to attain that goal, regardless of importance and value. The pursuit is switched to the attainment of avoidance goals; for example, “to avoid isolation” is attained by their attributions because specifically attainable steps are tenuously more representative of their behavioural repertoire. Because of internal, stable, and global attributions, the resulting interpretation is that they are not happy (i.e., internal) and that they are isolated. Clark & Beck (1999) stated that it is perceived as a persistent characteristic (i.e., stable; Abramson et al., 1978). A reference to their whole identity, a core belief; the schematic structure extends to other (i.e., global) non-related parameters about themselves (i.e., “if I get rejected, I am not desirable—if I am not desirable, then I cannot be happy—If I cannot be happy, then I am worthless): the hopeless disposition.
An Important proposition in Cognitive Theory is that thoughts can be response-independent (Clark & Beck, 1999). The typical structure and process resulting in the idiosyncratic depressive product or content were automatic and involuntary, and have plausibility and perseveration. The distorted cognitions appeared as if they needed no antecedent stimulus, they appeared without effort, were accepted into the belief structure without question, and had a repetitive and persistent presence (Beck, 1963). Implying that these distorted cognitions typically go unnoticed and have a dominant position in ascribing meaning and its organisation of incoming information. The psychological energy expenditure depressed patients exert tends to manifest as rumination (Andrews & Thomson Jr, 2009; Spasojevic & Alloy, 2001). The relation rumination has with goal-directive behaviour may be the taxing nature of cognitively associating negatively affected content with their self-representation (Jones et al., 2009): The constant process of comparing, imposing self-injunctions, and distortions of self-image about past experiences fueling certainty predictions about future goal content (Andersen, 1990; Erickson et al., 2017: Sedikides et al., 2010). Beck (1963) stated that ruminations occurred when the patients were not attempting to direct their thoughts, letting their thoughts freely associate without any conscious effort or awareness. The non-specificity in goal formulation is another schematic dimension subsumed by the predominantly negative organisation. Consequently, the network of negative schematic content solidifies as a subjectively valid means of interpreting incoming information and constructing future self-representations.
This paper stressed that either model complimented the other. Although quite similar, differences were pedantic and mainly in the level of analysis; specifically, Clark & Beck (1999) cumulating an evidence base for the structure and process of how the attributions and appraisals were placed. We propose that the helplessness model (Abramson et al., 1978) missed a dimension in their attribution matrix: the attributions of evidence or information that were valid and invalid: Valid—Invalid. The dismissal or approval of evidence (i.e., information processing) is seen in Beck’s formulations (1963; Clark & Beck, 1999). Particularly theorising that the typical depressive information-processing mechanisms were operating with selectively inappropriate data magnifying negative events, ascribing more value and meaning to these occurrences while completely dismissing or perceptually ignoring relevant and contradictory evidence. Cognitive models of depression, albeit more theoretical, attempt to typify depressogenic cognition, while the helplessness model of depression attempts to use circumscriptions of perceived control plus predictions upon outcomes and events. Either model stresses the importance of the attributional and appraisal formulations about the temporal relationship of environmental stimuli, perceived relevance, and the resulting affective state.
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