Theories of Depression

Albert Bandura:

Albert Bandura's Social Cognitive learning theory suggested that people are shaped by the interactions between their behaviors, thoughts, and environmental events. Each piece in the puzzle can and does affect the shape of the other pieces. Human behavior ends up being largely a product of learning, which may occur vicariously (e.g., by way of observation), as well as through direct experience.

Bandura pointed out that depressed people's self-concepts are different from non-depressed people's self-concepts. Depressed people tend to hold themselves solely responsible for bad things in their lives and are full of self-recrimination and self-blame. In contrast, successes tend to get viewed as having been caused by external factors outside of the depressed person's control. In addition, depressed people tend to have low levels of self-efficacy (a person's belief that they are capable of influencing their situation). Because depressed people also have a flawed judgmental process, they tend to set their personal goals too high, and then fall short of reaching them. Repeated failure further reduces feelings of self-efficacy and leads to depression.

Juilian Rotter:

Rotter began work on his social learning theory of personality and in 1954 Social Learning and Clinical Psychology was published. In this book he laid out the basic tenets of his social learning theory, the main idea of which is that personality is really the interaction between a person and his or her environment. Personality does not reside within an individual independent of the environment he or she is in. By the same token, an individual's behaviors are not simple, reflexive responses to an objective environment. Rather, the environment an individual responds to or acts in is dependent on that particular individual's learning experiences and life history. What stimuli people respond to are shaped by their experiences. Two people might experience the same environment in very different ways. For example, Joe might respond to a visit to the doctor with apprehension because his last visit involved getting a painful shot, whereas Sam would not be apprehensive at all because his last visit was pleasant and did not involve any discomfort. To Rotter, personality is a relatively fixed group of dispositions to react to situations in a certain manner. He stressed that most learning takes place in social situations with other people. Rotter's personality theory was the first to comprehensively integrate cognition, in the form of expectancy, with learning and motivation, in the form of reinforcement. 

Martin Seligman: 

In early 1965, psychologist Martin Seligman and his colleagues" accidentally" discovered an unexpected phenomenon related to human depression while studying the relationship between fear and learning in dogs. Seligman's study involved watching what happened when a dog was allowed to escape an impending (and aversive but non-damaging) shock so long as they escaped from a designated area of their enclosure upon hearing a tone. During the first experiment, the researcher rang a bell immediately prior to administering a brief slightly unpleasant sensation to the dog. The idea was that the dog would learn to associate the tone with the shock. In the future, the dog would then feel fear when it heard the bell, and would run away or show some other fear-related behavior upon hearing the tone.

During the next part of the experiments, the researchers put the conditioned dog (which had just learned that hearing the tone is a warning for an upcoming shock) into a box with two compartments divided by a low fence. Even though the dog could easily see over and jump over the fence, when the researchers rang the bell and administered the shock, nothing happened (the dog was expected to jump over the fence.) Similarly, when they shocked the conditioned dog without the bell, nothing happened. In both situations, the dog simply lay down. Interestingly, when the researchers put a normal dog into the same box contraption, it immediately jumped over the fence to the other side.

Apparently, the conditioned dog had learned more than the connection between the tone and the shock. It has also learned that trying to escape from the shocks was futile.

Aaron Beck: 

Cognitive Behavior Theory

According to Beck, "If beliefs do not change, there is no improvement. If beliefs change, symptoms change. Beliefs function as little operational units," which means that one's thoughts and beliefs (schema) affect one’s behavior and subsequent actions. He believed that dysfunctional behavior is caused due to dysfunctional thinking, and that thinking is shaped by our beliefs. Our beliefs decide the course of our actions. Beck was convinced of positive results if patients could be persuaded to think constructively and forsake negative thinking.