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Success Expectancy In Depressives, Marilyn Frances Barnowe-Meyer

Dissertations and Theses

This thesis was an attempt to investigate two important cognitive aspects of depression: expectation of success, and changes in this expectation. Recent studies in these areas have yielded inconsistent results. It has generally been concluded that subclinical depressives do not differ from nondepressives in initial expectation of success, though they do at times exhibit smaller changes in success expectancy following personal experiences of success or failure. Two main cognitive theories of depression have attempted to account for this difference between the two populations. Beck (1967) has proposed that depression results from specific negative cognitive processes, among them a denial of …