Abstract
This paper tests Beck's theory that depressives uniformly have stable cognitive patterns for interpreting environmental information. Specifically, it is questioned whether depressives have schemata for interpreting (or distorting)information relative to their beliefs and self-attitudes. Thirteen depressives were compared with 13 nondepressives in the subjective organization of self-descriptive adjectives on multitrial free recall as well as in the clustering of words on final free recall. As expected, level of depression was negatively related to the subjective organization of adjectives but held no systematic relationship with the subjective organization of abstract nouns. Likewise, depression was associated with lower category cluster on final free recall. These results suggest that some depressives may lack stable cognitive schemata for interpreting personal information. Implications are discussed relative to Beck's cognitive model, to Seligman's learned helplessness reformulation, and to cognitive behavior therapy.
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