All-or-nothing thinking (or dichotomous reasoning): seeing things in black or white as
opposed to shades of gray; thinking in terms of false dilemmas. Splitting involves using
terms like "always", "every" or "never" when this is neither true, nor equivalent to the
truth.
Example: When an admired person makes a minor mistake, the admiration is turned
into contempt.
Overgeneralization: Making hasty generalizations from insufficient experiences and
evidence. Making a very broad conclusion based on a single incident or a single piece of
evidence. If something bad happens only once, it is expected to happen over and over
again.[2]
Example: A person is lonely and often spends most of her time at home. Her friends
sometimes ask her to come out for dinner and meet new people. She feels it is useless
to try to meet people. No one really could like her.[6]
Filtering: focusing entirely on negative elements of a situation, to the exclusion of the
positive. Also, the brain's tendency to filter out information which does not conform to
already held beliefs.
Example: After receiving comments about a work presentation, a person focuses on
the single critical comment and ignores what went well.
Disqualifying the positive: discounting positive events.
Example: Upon receiving a congratulation, a person dismisses it out-of-hand,
believing it to be undeserved, and automatically interpreting the compliment (at least
inwardly) as an attempt at flattery or perhaps as arising out of naïveté.
Jumping to conclusions: reaching preliminary conclusions (usually negative) from little
(if any) evidence. Two specific subtypes are identified:
Mind reading: Inferring a person's possible or probable (usually negative) thoughts
from their behavior andnonverbal communication; taking precautions against the
worst reasonably suspected case or some other preliminary conclusion, without asking
the person.
Example: A student assumes the readers of their paper have already made up their
mind concerning its topic, and therefore writing the paper is a pointless exercise.[5]
Fortune-telling: predicting negative outcomes of events.
Example: Being convinced of failure before a test, when the student is in fact
prepared.
Magnification and minimization – Giving proportionally greater weight to a perceived
failure, weakness or threat, or lesser weight to a perceived success, strength or
opportunity, so the weight differs from that assigned to the event or thing by others. This
is common enough in the normal population to popularize idioms such as "make a
mountain out of a molehill". In depressed clients, often the positive characteristics ofother
people are exaggerated and negative characteristics are understated. There is one subtype
of magnification:
Catastrophizing – Giving greater weight to the worst possible outcome, however
unlikely, or experiencing a situation as unbearable or impossible when it is just
uncomfortable.
Example: A teenager is too afraid to start driver's training because he believes he
would get himself into an accident.
Emotional reasoning: presuming that negative feelings expose the true nature of things,
and experiencing reality as a reflection of emotionally linked thoughts. Thinking
something is true, solely based on a feeling.
Example: "I feel (i.e. think that I am) stupid or boring, therefore I must be."[7] Or,
feeling that fear of flying in planes means planes are a very dangerous way to travel.
Or, concluding that it's hopeless to clean one's house due to being overwhelmed by
the prospect of cleaning.[6]
Should statements: doing, or expecting others to do, what they morally should or
ought to do irrespective of the particular case the person is faced with. This involves
conforming strenuously to ethical categorical imperatives which, by definition, "always
apply," or to hypothetical imperatives which apply in that general type of case. Albert
Ellis termed this "musturbation". Psychotherapist Michael C. Graham describes this as
"expecting the world to be different than it is".[8]
Example: After a performance, a concert pianist believes he or she should not have
made so many mistakes. Or, while waiting for an appointment, thinking that the
service provider should be on time, and feeling bitter and resentful as a result.[6]
Labeling and mislabeling: a more severe type of overgeneralization; attributing a
person's actions to their character instead of some accidental attribute. Rather than
assuming the behavior to be accidental or extrinsic, the person assigns a label to someone
or something that implies the character of that person or thing. Mislabeling involves
describing an event with language that has a strong connotation of a person'sevaluation of
the event.
Example of "labeling": Instead of believing that you made a mistake, you believe that
you are a loser, because only a loser would make that kind of mistake. Or, someone
who made a bad first impression is a "jerk", in the absence of some more specific
cause.
Example of "mislabeling": A woman who places her children in a day care center is
"abandoning her children to strangers," because the person who says so
highly values the bond between mother and child.
Personalization – attributing personal responsibility, including the resulting praise or
blame, for events over which a person has no control.
Example: A mother whose child is struggling in school blames herself entirely for
being a bad mother, because she believes that her deficient parenting is responsible.
In fact, the real cause may be something else entirely.
Blaming: the opposite of personalization; holding other people responsible for the harm
they cause, and especially for their intentional or negligent infliction of emotional
distress on us.[7]
Example: a spouse blames their husband or wife entirely for marital problems, instead
of looking at his/her own part in the problems.
Fallacy of change - Relying on social control to obtain cooperative actions from another
person.[7]
Always being right - Prioritizing self-interest over the feelings of another person.[7]
