clinical psychology Clinical psychology is an integration of social science, theory, and clinical knowledge for the purpose of understanding, preventing, and relieving psychologically based distress or dysfunction and to promote subjective well-being and persona ...

, selective abstraction is a type of

cognitive bias A cognitive bias is a systematic pattern of deviation from norm or rationality in judgment. Individuals create their own "subjective reality" from their perception of the input. An individual's construction of reality, not the objective input, m ...

or cognitive distortion in which a detail is taken out of context and believed whilst everything else in the context is ignored. It commonly appears in Aaron T. Beck's work in cognitive therapy. Another definition is: "focusing on only the negative aspects of an event, such as, 'I ruined the whole recital because of that one mistake.Weems, C. F., Berman, S. L., Silverman, W. K., & Saavedra, L. M. (2001). "Cognitive errors in youth with anxiety disorders: The linkages between negative cognitive errors and anxious symptoms". ''Cognitive Therapy and Research'', ''25''(5), 559-575.

Effects

A team of researchers analyzed the association between cognitive errors in youths with anxiety disorders by using the Children's Negative Cognitive Error Questionnaire (CNCEQ) and "several other self-reporting measures" (Children's Depression Inventory, Childhood Anxiety Sensitivity Index, Revised Children's Manifest Anxiety Scale, and the

State-Trait Anxiety Inventory The State-Trait Anxiety Inventory (STAI) is a psychological inventory consisting of 40 self-report items on a 4-point Likert scale. The STAI measures two types of anxiety – state anxiety and trait anxiety. Higher scores are positively correlated ...

for Children-Trait Version). By assessing the CNCEQ, the researchers found that selective abstraction was related to both

child depression Depression is a mental disorder characterized by prolonged unhappiness or irritability, accompanied by a constellation of somatic and cognitive signs and symptoms such as fatigue, apathy, sleep problems, loss of appetite, loss of engagement; lo ...

and "measures of anxiety (i.e., trait anxiety, manifest anxiety, and anxiety sensitivity)". One study noted that "some consistent findings have emerged with respect to the presence of specific cognitive errors in anxiety versus depression. 'Selective abstraction' is more commonly associated with depression than with anxiety".Maric, M., Heyne, D. A., van Widenfelt, B., M., & Westenberg, P. M. (2011). "Distorted cognitive processing in youth: The structure of negative cognitive errors and their associations with anxiety". ''Cognitive Therapy and Research'', 35(1), 11-20.Leitenberg, H., Yost, L. W., & Carroll-Wilson, M. (1986). "Negative cognitive errors in children: Questionnaire development, normative data, and comparisons between children with and without self-reported symptoms of depression, low self-esteem, and evaluation anxiety". '' Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology'', 54, 528–536.

References

Clinical psychology {{Psychology-stub