Summary:

- Selective Abstraction: it pays attention to one aspect or a single detail of the situation. The positive aspects are often ignored in favor of the negative.
- dichotomous thinking: Events are evaluated in extreme form, the good guy / bad, black / white, on / off, etc.
- Arbitrary Inference: are conclusions drawn from situations that are not supported by the facts, even when the evidence is inconsistent with the conclusion.
- Overgeneralization: you come to a general conclusion from a particular event.
- magnify and minimize: assumes a tendency to exaggerate the negative aspects of a situation, minimizing the positive.
- Customization: personal characteristics are attributed to a situation.
- catastrophic vision: they anticipate events that the worst will definitely happen.
- Doverizzazione: it imposes strict rules and strict about how things should go.
- Global Variables: General labels are used on events that do not consider the different shades.

Full text:
The negative beliefs about themselves, about the world and the future often depend on wrong ways of observing reality and reason, such errors in reasoning or cognitive distortions.



These often originate in childhood, even for the influence of the behavior of parents and are then activated by events and stressful situations (Vicentini, 2013).

Cognitive distortions are dysfunctional ways of interpreting the experiences they are characterized by the process and not for the content.
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From automatic thoughts in cognitive distortions

To understand how to intervene and how these cognitive distortions cause suffering to patients, we need to make a small theoretical step backwards, starting from the concept of automatic thoughts.

According to the cognitive-behavioral approach would be psychological disorders caused by dysfunctional automatic thoughts that people use in processing the situations and life events.

The first to speak of automatic thoughts was Aaron T. Beck, who noted how certain thoughts of his patients were activated immediately and without awareness. He poses as a focus, in his clinical practice, to seek, together with the patient, to highlight what were the automatic thoughts at the base of the suffering brought to the session.

These thoughts are said automatic because, according to Beck, present themselves to consciousness, precisely, in an automatic way, in almost telegraphic form, without there being a subjective experience of reflection by the individual. Also they are hired, who thinks them as plausible and, therefore, there is a process of critical distance from them: the individual takes no awareness of the fact these thoughts through the very essence of the world around him, that these they are subjective and therefore questionable and objectionable. Automatic thoughts lead in this way the attribution of meaning that the subject gives to his life and relationships established with other (Semerari, 2000).

Therefore, according to Beck, they are thus creating rules of inference and stable meaning structures that underlie the thinking processes. These structures are called cognitive schemes. Through these you sift, you process and interpret the information coming from the external world, which is why two people evaluate the same event differently or the same person you approach to different events in the same way (Beck and Freeman 1990; Lorenzini and Sassaroli 1995) .

Some schemes say they are dysfunctional when you distort reality, cause suffering, are pervasive and give rise to false syllogisms. Because, those suffering from mental disorders, it is so hard to change the dysfunctional nature of the schemes?

According to Beck and colleagues (1979), to prevent the correction of beliefs generated by dysfunctional patterns, there are the cognitive distortions or systematic procedural errors used in the evaluation process and judgment.
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What are the most common cognitive distortions?

Beck identifies a number of cognitive distortions in the application of automatic thoughts.

They are:

Selective Abstraction: it pays attention to a single aspect or a single detail of the situation. The positive aspects are often ignored in favor of the negative.
dichotomous thinking: Events are evaluated in extreme form, the good guy / bad, black / white, on / off, etc.
Arbitrary inference: are conclusions drawn from situations that are not supported by the facts, even when the evidence is inconsistent with the conclusion.
Overgeneralization: you come to a general conclusion from a particular event.
Magnify and minimize: assumes a tendency to exaggerate the negative aspects of a situation, minimizing the positive.
Customization: personal characteristics are attributed to a situation.
catastrophic vision: they anticipate events that the worst will definitely happen.
Doverizzazione: it imposes rigid and strict rules about how things should go.
Global Variables: General labels are used on events that do not consider the different shades.

The ultimate goal of therapy, according to Beck, is in the cognitive restructuring, the company can modify the way you interpret and evaluate situations of life. So, you should encourage the patient to modify the automatic thoughts and to free themselves from cognitive distortions to replace them with more realistic thoughts, flexible and adaptive.

From Stateofmind