List a variety of stresses that people experience in their everyday lives that may feature cognitive distortions. Try to identify examples of all six cognitive distortions described in this chapter.

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

Some examples of the cognitive distortions include:
• Arbitrary inference – A homeless parent’s problems related to maintaining a stable household is attributed to events that occur outside the self, not considering that he or she may have some impact on what is happening within the family that puts them at risk for homelessness.
• Selective abstraction – A person assumes that the work he is doing with a small committee at his workplace is poor because one member of the group continuously displays signs of boredom.
• Magnification or minimization – A person’s denying or minimizing the fact that he or she is ill because the day will be busy; the persons says that it’s “really nothing” as he stumbles through the day, unable to function effectively.
• Overgeneralization – A social worker has problems intervening effectively with a particular resistant client and assumes that he or she is not a competent professional
• Personalization – A university teacher has a poor experience in the classroom one day and assumes that it is because he was not prepared, although in fact the situation is likely to represent an interaction between the readiness and performance of the students as well as the teacher
• Dichotomous thinking – A student thinks he or she must get an A, and that anything else is really a failing grade