Painful truths about depressives' cognitions.

Cognitive theories assert that depressed persons' cognitions are distorted. Most of the empirical literature directly contradicts this assertion. Using a wide variety of methods to study a wide variety of cognitive processes, experiments consistently find that depressed people suffer significantly less cognitive distortion than do both normals and nondepressed psychiatric patients. It was speculated that childhood traumas predispose depression by preventing the normal formation of a defensive screen against painful realities.