Jul 03, · Step 2: Writing an outline for a depression research paper. The outline is the core step in writing the research paper. It is here that you organize all the ideas and research materials that you have gathered. Arrange the argument according to the strength of each one to your topic. This section is arranged in point form stating each important blogger.comted Reading Time: 4 mins depression disorder (MDD) for the European Union Member States and the world as a whole, assesses the current treatment options available for MDD as well as the treatments under development and makes recommendations on future research priorities. The paper demonstrates data and trends derived (mainly) from the recently published File Size: 3MB In fact, research indicates that more cases of depression are characterized by the accrual of multiple chronic mild stressors, such as work-related stress, homemaking demands, and financial trouble than by major losses such as divorce or the loss of a job (Billings & Moos, ; Kessler, ; Mazure, ; Monroe & Depue, ; Paykel, ). In these cases we suggest that the core elicited affective experience of depression Cited by:
The Nature of Clinical Depression: Symptoms, Syndromes, and Behavior Analysis
Try out PMC Labs and tell us what you think. Learn More. In this article we discuss the traditional behavioral models of depression and some of the challenges analyzing a phenomenon with such complex and varied features. We present the traditional model and suggest that it does not capture the complexity of the phenomenon, nor do syndromal models of depression that dominate the mainstream conceptualization of depression.
Instead, we emphasize ideographic analysis and present depression as a maladaptive dysregulation of an ultimately adaptive elicited emotional response, research paper depression. We emphasize environmental factors, specifically aversive control and private verbal events, in terms of relational frame theory, that may transform an adaptive response into a maladaptive disorder. We consider the role of negative thought processes and rumination, common and debilitating aspects of depression that have traditionally been neglected by behavior analysts.
As the field of clinical behavior analysis grows, it will benefit from analyses of increasingly complex and common clinical phenomena, especially those with significant public health implications. Up to 25 million people in the United States alone meet criteria for some type of depressive disorder in a given year M.
Keller, Depressive disorders also result in considerable financial expenditure including time spent away from the workplace and an research paper depression in health care costs. Suicide is the ultimate cost.
Perhaps nowhere in clinical psychology is the medicalization of behavioral problems more complete than with depression. Depression is largely seen by the general public and mainstream media as a neuropsychiatric illness e. An additional assumption is research paper depression this disorder may be diagnosed and labeled using the symptom checklists of the standard diagnostic system, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders DSM-IV-TR ; American Psychiatric Research paper depression, The basic ontological assumption is that depression is an illness that occurs episodically and can be described adequately in medical terms.
Even in these cases, specialty referral is first to psychiatry for medication management, and only a small number of individuals diagnosed with depression will be seen by a clinical psychologist, much less a behaviorally oriented practitioner.
A hallmark of behavior analysis has been its condemnation of the misappropriation of lay terms as scientific, technical terms e. The first task is precise specification of the behavioral phenomena invoked by the term. There are several obstacles to achieving this precision with the term depression, which have been excellently presented for the term anxiety by Friman, Hayes, and Wilson The case for depression is quite similar. First, the term depression was never meant as a technical term and actually has a metaphorical, idiomatic basis.
Second, our psychiatric nomenclature and mainstream usage of the term research paper depression that depression is an empirical phenomenon with an essential composition. To a behavior analyst, the term depression is not a technical term, does not precisely map onto any empirical or behavioral phenomena, and has no essential composition, research paper depression.
Thus, given the exhaustive medicalization of the phenomenon of depression, research paper depression, there exists an immense gap between a behavioral analysis of depression and mainstream usage of it as research paper depression medical term with its various associations and meanings. Behavior-analytic writings on clinical depression e. Although research on depression has outpaced research on virtually every other disorder by psychiatric and cognitive-behavioral researchers, behavior analysts have been alarmingly silent.
There are undoubtedly many reasons for this silence e. More relevant to the current paper is the possibility that the exhaustive medicalization of the term; the wealth of non-behavior-analytic research data on biology and genetics, personality, and cognitive factors; and the emphasis on private events in depression—on how depression feels and on changing that feeling—may function to evoke avoidance in behavior analysts. In this paper we attempt to start at the beginning, with a discussion of what depression is to a behavior analyst and how this contrasts with mainstream usage of the term as a medical syndrome.
We review the traditional operant model of depression that emphasized reductions in behavior as a response to environmental events. We then tackle several areas of inquiry important to an understanding of depression that have traditionally been neglected by behavior analysts, including private events and the role of verbal behavior in depression. We see this not as completing a behavioral analysis but as a reminder of the importance of idiographic, functional analyses of specific individuals for this complex phenomenon.
We describe depression in radical behavioral terms, emphasizing the occasions on which the term is used and deemphasizing any underlying unitary disease, physiological, or emotional state to which the term refers. Depression comes from the late Research paper depression word depressare and the classical Latin word deprimere. Thus, the core experience of depression appears to be a private event tacted as depressed or in psychiatric terms as dysphoric.
However, a minority of individuals will meet criteria for depression and deny depressed mood or present with irritable mood instead. These individuals may have deficits in accurate tacting of private experience, or they may represent diagnostic Type II errors and should not be classified as depressed. It is important not to associate what is tacted as depression with a specific pattern of physiological responding research paper depression reify it as a particular emotional state.
The antecedent conditions and underlying physiologies associated with the experience of depression may vary widely, and no core composition can be assumed.
Emotional states such as sadness are simply co-occurring behavioral responses elicited unconditioned reflexes, conditioned reflexes, operant predispositions that appear to be integrated because the behaviors are occasioned by common discriminanda and are controlled by common consequences Skinner, For example, a child with overbearing parents experiences an emotional state of sadness research paper depression a co-occurring behavioral response of crying when her parents criticize her.
The crying is negatively reinforced when her parents comfort her and stop criticizing her, which may also result in a change of her emotional state. The particular quality of an emotional state labeled depression should vary with the characteristics of the environmental triggers.
For example, private events labeled as depressed may be associated with overworking and receiving little reinforcement for long stretches of time or with grieving the death of a loved partner, research paper depression. In each case the underlying physiology is presumably different, research paper depression, but the experienced phenomena may be sufficiently similar to prompt the tact. More specific discrimination training may be useful e.
The psychiatric nomenclature emphasizes this core experience and several additional symptoms. Depressed mood or dysphoria is the primary feature of major depressive disorder MDDthe most common depressive diagnosis. In addition to this core experience, there are several research paper depression symptoms of MDD, research paper depression, including loss of interest in activities, sleep and appetite changes, guilt and hopelessness, fatigue, restlessness, concentration problems, and suicidal ideation.
For example, some clients experience vegetative symptoms of depression decreased appetite and insomnia whereas, less commonly, others experience reversed vegetative symptoms of increased appetite and hypersomnia. Similarly, psychomotor retardation is more common and agitation is less common, and both may be demonstrated by the same individual at different times.
To account for this complexity, DSM-IV-TR has parsed depression into various additional categories, each with similar and overlapping characteristics, and there are an increasing number of diagnostic categories of depressive disorders or problems involving sad or irritable affect. In fact, Appendix B of DSM-IV-TR lists 17 proposed disorders for further study, six of which deal with disorders of mood.
Although detailed review of these subcategories is outside the purview of this paper, it should be noted that although there may indeed be different syndromes with different etiologies and treatment implications, a behavior-analytic view holds that the current proliferation of depressive disorders is largely unnecessary. We see not several distinct disorders but a phenomenon of depression with great variability in time course, symptom severity, and correlated conditions, research paper depression.
All the disorders share a depressed mood symptom that parallels the core experience of the problem, and all share several additional criteria with MDD, often differing only in duration or number of symptoms. From an idiographic behavior-analytic perspective, there exists not one or three or several depressive disorders—there are as many depressive disorders as there are depressed individuals, research paper depression.
The constellation of depressive disorders with shared characteristics suggests that the tact depression involves a variety of public and private antecedent stimulating events that vary from occasion to occasion but have sufficient overlapping properties to occasion consistent usage of the term.
We view the diversity of additional symptoms represented by these disorders as consistent with the diversity of environmental research paper depression of research paper depression, physiological states labeled depressionand psychological responses to the environmental causes and physiological states. Thus, no overarching depressive syndromes are posited or assumed at this point. Nonetheless, commonalities in history, environmental antecedents, and symptom research paper depression exist and may guide treatment decisions.
Thus, our understanding of depression must allow for the great variety of stimulus conditions that occasion use of the term.
We can discard several classes of use that we can simply label as incorrect. For example, an individual learning a foreign language may simply state the wrong word.
Likewise, a person may be diagnosed with depression but later it is determined that the person has a large cancerous tumor that is causing the symptoms. Although a complete behavioral analysis must account for these usages, they are not interesting from a clinical standpoint. More important are instances in which the term is not used but could be. For example, a person visits a psychologist and complains of several symptoms of research paper depression but not depressed mood.
The psychologist performs a diagnostic interview, and the client falls one symptom short of the diagnosis of MDD. In this case it is advantageous to consider the person depressed even research paper depression it is possible that neither the psychologist nor the research paper depression will use the term, research paper depression. Skinner wrote very little on depression; when he did, he emphasized overt behavior rather than the core affective experience, in line with an operant rather than respondent model.
For example, in he wrote. Other parts of his behavior become strong because they are automatically reinforced under the prevailing deprivation; he will talk to anyone who will listen about his old surroundings, his old friends, research paper depression, and what he used to do, research paper depression.
This is all a result of deprivation. We cannot classify this as the result of deprivation because the behavior which is thus affected has not been research paper depression restrained. Three aspects of this passage are noteworthy, research paper depression. First, as Skinner typically did, by placing the term depression in quotes he was careful to avoid giving it any special status other than that of a verbal description. As discussed above, this practice of placing such terms in quotes may be awkward and tiresome but serves as a reminder that certain assumptions are not to be made when using them.
The quotes also serve as a reminder of an important verbal quality to the term, discussed below. Consistent with an operant model, he did not elaborate on this point and instead focused on research paper depression behavioral reductions.
Third, Skinner highlighted the centrality of reduced positive reinforcement in depression. Simply put, social behavior depends on a reinforcing environment; change the environment so that responses do not yield reinforcement and one reduces the behavior. This notion became the foundation of Lewinsohn's theory and dominated the behavioral literature for several decades.
Lewinsohn described depression as characterized primarily by a low rate of response-contingent positive reinforcement RCPR. In a nutshell, Lewinsohn emphasized environmental events that produce losses of major sources of RCPR, such as a divorce or the loss of a job, and social skills deficits that limit an individual's ability to reobtain RCPR once it has been lost.
Thus, his model focused on the behavioral reductions often seen in depression. Lewinsohn assumed the core experience to be an elicited by-product of these situations, but he did not detail this process. Other symptoms of depression e. We hold that Lewinsohn's characterization of the core affective experience of depression research paper depression an elicited by-product of losses of or reductions in positive reinforcement is fundamental to understanding depression. Some cases of depression clearly are described best by Lewinsohn's model, such as single, discrete episodes of depression with clear environmental precipitants and with symptom profiles that emphasize behavioral reductions that resolve when the environments are reinstated.
For example, a person may become depressed after a divorce or loss of job, and the depression resolves when the person finds a new relationship partner or a new job. With cases of chronic depression, Lewinsohn's model emphasizes persistently insufficient levels of reinforcement and social skills deficits that prevent the individual from changing the situation, and this model also seems to be adequate for some cases.
For example, a person who becomes depressed after a divorce, resulting in a net reduction in research paper depression reinforcement, and does not have adequate social skills for initiating new romantic relationships will likely become chronically depressed until the necessary social skills are learned.
All of this is nothing new. However, Lewinsohn's model vastly underestimated the variety and complexity of factors that can reduce behavior. Indeed, the field of behavior analysis, if nothing else, has demonstrated functional processes that can increase or decrease behavior.
All functional processes that decrease behavior are potentially relevant, if the behavioral reductions produced are large and generalized and a dysphoric reaction occurs concomitant with the behavioral reductions. Further consideration of this complexity is provided by Hopko, research paper depression, Lejuez, Ruggiero, and Eifert and Lejuez, Hopko, and Hopkowho analyzed depression in terms of the matching law Herrnstein,
Decoding Depression
, time: 1:32:15Preparing to Write a Depression Research Paper

Jul 03, · Step 2: Writing an outline for a depression research paper. The outline is the core step in writing the research paper. It is here that you organize all the ideas and research materials that you have gathered. Arrange the argument according to the strength of each one to your topic. This section is arranged in point form stating each important blogger.comted Reading Time: 4 mins In fact, research indicates that more cases of depression are characterized by the accrual of multiple chronic mild stressors, such as work-related stress, homemaking demands, and financial trouble than by major losses such as divorce or the loss of a job (Billings & Moos, ; Kessler, ; Mazure, ; Monroe & Depue, ; Paykel, ). In these cases we suggest that the core elicited affective experience of depression Cited by: Although more and more focus has been laid on the brain research, especially the “BRAIN Project” launched by the national institutes of health (NIH) which will invest more money and energy into this area, our understanding about how the brain deals with the external information and how mental diseases especially depression and schizophrenia Cited by:
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