Abstract
Recent reviews of cognitive theories of depression have noted that individualized assessment strategies might help to resolve mixed findings regarding the stability of depressotypic beliefs and attitudes. We describe encouraging results for an individualized measure of one such cognitive construct, irrational beliefs. Twenty depressionโprone women (recurrent major depressives in full remission) and twenty closely matched neverโdepressed controls completed leading forcedโchoice measures of irrational beliefs (the Belief Scale; BS) and sociotropyโautonomy (The Revised Personal Style Inventory), as well as the Specific Demands on Self Scale (SDS). The BS requires participants to rate their agreement with twenty preselected statements of irrational beliefs, while the SDS focuses on whether participants harbor any strongly held irrational beliefs, even if uncommon or idiosyncratic. Consistent with previous research, there were no group differences on the traditional measure of irrational beliefs. In contrast, depressionโprone participants strongly exceeded controls on the SDS, and this difference persisted after controlling for residual depression, anxiety symptoms, anxiety diagnoses, sociotropy, and autonomy. These findings provide some initial support for a key assumption of the rationalโemotive model of depression, and, more broadly, suggest that individualized assessment strategies may help researchers capture the core negative beliefs of asymptomatic individuals, even in the absence of mood or cognitive priming. ยฉ 2003 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Clin Psychol 59: 439โ455, 2003.