Disqualifying the Positive

This is an extreme form of all-or-nothing thinking in which we filter out all the positive evidence about our performance, and only attend to the negative. It is all-or-nothing thinking, without the "all"! This cognitive distortion will produce automatic thoughts that reinforce negative feelings and explain away positive ones. If you've ever tried to argue someone out of a bad mood, you've probably seen this cognitive distortion from the outside. If you've ever been in a bad mood yourself, you may have seen it from the inside. Usually people who are caught up in this cognitive distortion are genuinely depressed about something, but it may be something that has no obvious connection with the topic at hand. I was going over an essay with a student who had gotten responses from three other students to a working draft of his essay. Our conversation went something like this:

STUDENT: I think I should just throw this out and start over. It's trash. Look at what Cheri said about it.
ME: Well, yes, she did beat up on it pretty well. But Bob, who also read it, seemed to like it.
STUDENT: Yeah, but he was just trying to be nice.
ME: How do you know that?
STUDENT: Oh, you know, people try to say nice things, even if it's really just junk, because they don't want to hurt your feelings.
ME: Well, that obviously isn't true of Cheri. But, OK, if you want to start over, do you have another topic in mind?
STUDENT: No. Well, I did, sort of, but it's no good either. They'd trash it just like this one. I could never get enough evidence to convince her.

Someone who is disqualifying the positive can't discuss a subject rationally because he is using a double standard. Negative evidence, no matter how weak or irrelevant, counts. Positive evidence, no matter how strong or persuasive, can be explained away. As it turned out, the student in the above conversation had just broken up with his girlfriend and was feeling very low. But this sort of automatic thought doesn't make any more sense when you're sad than it does when you're happy. The "logic" behind it goes something like this: Things are bad, so why not make them worse?

Link: http://daphne.palomar.edu/jtagg/disqual.htm

All-or-Nothing Thinking

We engage in all-or-nothing thinking when we accept automatic thoughts which describe events in black-and-white categories, with no shades of gray. It is a more extreme form of magnification and minimization in which we minimize to the point that many positive aspects of life completely disappear from sight. Such automatic thoughts lead to a kind of perfectionism that defines everything short of 100% success as a failure. To a point, such perfectionism can lead us to try harder; but in the long run, inevitably, it tends to discourage us from trying at all. Since we encounter very little black or white in the real world, this kind of thinking squeezes much of the brightness out of our view of the world: all the shades of gray come to look as black as night.

A few years ago I was teaching a class in which several standardized tests were required. One semester, a woman took the class who got the highest total score on the standardized tests that I've ever recorded in that class. Out of a possible 200 points on the four tests, she missed five. But when this woman got her first essay back, she found several criticisms and suggestions for improvement. (The essay was not graded.) She seemed depressed and irritable in class for several days after getting the essay back. Finally, I persuaded her to come in and talk to me about it, and I asked her what she was so concerned about. 

"Well," she said hopelessly, "I guess I'm just going to get an 'F' in this class." From her point of view, her essay wasn't perfect, so it was worthless. Her automatic thoughts on receiving the essay back were probably something like this: "There are flaws in this essay, even after I worked hard on it, so I wasted my time. I produced nothing of value." That's all-or-nothing thinking.

This cognitive distortion can be devastating when you are trying to learn a new skill or improve your performance in an old one. A sculptor who thinks in terms of all-or-nothing will never finish a statue because the first stages of the work will always be rough. A writer who sees her rough draft as either finished or failed will never really finish an essay. You must accept your first draft as potentially good, but unfinished, in order to improve it. Many students fail to produce good essays not because they produce bad ones, but because they never finish the good ones they start.

Link: http://daphne.palomar.edu/jtagg/allor.htm

Magnification and Minimization

This cognitive distortion consists of seeing the positive results of your actions as smaller than they really are and the negative results of your actions as bigger than they really are. It is sometimes called "catastrophizing" or, more informally, "making a mountain out of a molehill." Like all-or-nothing thinking, it is a favorite cognitive distortion of perfectionists. It seldom fails that early on in the semester a student who has produced an excellent essay will come up to me and sheepishly apologize for handing in such unadulterated trash. Often such students will give lengthy and sorrowful explanations for why their elementary education was a failure or why they were horrible students in high school or why work or childbearing had driven everything they once knew about English right out of their heads. Surprisingly, these declarations often come after I've told the student that he or she produced a good essay. I've had several students actually drop the course after doing nothing but good work. People who apologize for good work are almost always magnifying and minimizing. They see six comma splices as more important than five pages of clear argument and sound evidence. They look at their errors through binoculars, but when they look at their virtues, they turn the binoculars around and look through the big end.

Link: http://daphne.palomar.edu/jtagg/mag.htm

Overgeneralization

Probably the most common mistake we make in our automatic thinking is overgeneralization. It's easy to see why. Each of us has to think about new experiences in terms of old experiences. We recognize most easily those qualities in a person or thing which we have seen before. The baby just learning to talk may call all men "Da-Da" or all four-legged animals "bow wow." But the baby will quickly learn to see the differences between different men and different animals. Generalization as a stage we go through in learning is not only acceptable; it is necessary. Until you recognize Bessie as a cow, you'll never be able to attend to the special characteristics--the clipped ear, the long tail--that make Bessie different from the other cows. We get into trouble when we stop at the generalization stage. All cows are not the same.

Because our automatic thoughts are based on our memories of past experiences, we might expect that many of those thoughts will tend to be generalizations that distort our perception of what we see. And that is the case. But because our automatic thoughts are automatic, it's very easy for us to stop with the generalizations, to accept them without examining them further. The strength of this cognitive distortion accounts for the prevalence of stereotyping in much of our thinking about other people. If I accept my automatic thoughts as reliable, I will probably conclude that all Blacks, or all Whites, or all Chicanos, or all Scandinavians are alike. And the less I actually know about a certain group of people, the stronger and clearer will be my stereotype.

The kind of overgeneralization that gives us, as students, the most trouble is the kind we make about our own performances and capabilities. If I've done poorly on essay exams in the past, when I find out that I have to take an essay exam my automatic thought may be, "I do poorly on essay exams." I am generalizing from one or two experiences of a certain kind to all experiences of a certain kind. Notice that this makes no sense at all until I have examined the differences, as well as the similarities, between the present task and the past one.

There are several specific forms of overgeneralization that most of us use at one time or another. And we have probably invented some variations that fall between the categories.

• Mental Filter

• Magnification and Minimization

• All-or-Nothing Thinking

• Disqualifying the Positive 

   Link: http://daphne.palomar.edu/jtagg/overgeneralization.htm

Mental Filter

Mental Filter

In this cognitive distortion, you concentrate so strongly on one aspect of a task or a situation that you can't even see the rest. Your automatic thoughts all deal with this one concern. If, for example, you ran out of time on a previous test, you may find yourself so preoccupied with the time limit that you have trouble concentrating on the questions. Five minutes into an hour-long test, you find yourself glancing at the clock. The automatic thought that keeps coming up is, "I'm going to run out of time." It may also be true that you can work faster on this test because you know the material better, but the cognitive distortion filters out that fact, and all the others that might help you. 

This is a conversation that I've had, with slight variations, with dozens of students:

STUDENT: So you hated my essay, huh?
ME: What do you mean, "hated it"? Where do you get that? You've got your essay right there--What did I say? Read me the first two words after your name, the first comment I made about it.
STUDENT: "Good essay."
ME: Why would I say that about an essay I hated? If I had hated it, wouldn't I be more likely to say something like, "Lousy essay"?
STUDENT: Yeah, but you go on about all this stuff wrong with it. You say I don't present enough evidence.

If you concentrate on a negative comment and filter out all the positive ones, you will nearly always be disappointed with your performance, even when you ought to be proud of it.

Three kinds of mental filters deserve special attention:

• Magnification and Minimization
  
• All-or-Nothing Thinking
  
• Disqualifying the Positive 

Source: http://daphne.palomar.edu/jtagg/mental.htm