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- Title
Análisis de contenido de constructos personales en la depresión.
- Authors
Montesano, Adrián; Feixas, Guillem; Varlotta, Nicolás
- Abstract
Kelly's Personal Construct Psychology (PCP) proposes that attributing meaning to experience is the most fundamental process of human psychological functioning. He describes psychological activity as a continuous process of creating, testing and revising personal theories (usually implicit) that allow people to understand and anticipate events. Personal constructs are the basic units of these personal theories. Constructs are bipolar contrasts of meaning that form an evolving network through which psychological processes are canalized. This system provides with a limited number of alternative views for explaining, anticipating and participating in life. One of the most significant contributions to psychological research made by PCP concerns the possibility to develop tools for the study of subjective construing. The Role Construct Repertory Grid (RepGrid) has been extensively used to explore the view subjects have of themselves, others and their problems. This technique elicits a sample of verbal descriptions of contrasting alternatives, his or her personal constructs; and provides several measures of self construing (e.g., self-esteem) and systems organization (e.g., complexity). Several authors point out the utility and pertinence of exploring the construct system in the evaluation of depressive disorders. They show the interest of studying the construct systems of depressive patients in order to measure some aspects that symptom and standard cognitive measures of cognitive distortions do not take into account. Depressive mood is highly influenced by the subject's view of him or herself and others, and by the organization of his or her constructs. However, the content of these personal constructs has received far less attention from researchers. The main goal of this article is to complement the PCP model of depression through the content analysis of personal constructs. In contrast with traditional content analysis, we do not evaluate the valency of the content but the principal meaning dimensions through which depressive people describe their interpersonal experience. According to PCP and other cognitive approaches, we hypothesize that the contents of the construct systems in the depressive sample are different from those of the control group. Specifically, we believe that the depressive group will show a higher number of constructs related to emotions and morality. The present study was carried out with 53 patients seeking psychological treatment in various private clinics in Barcelona who met DSM-IV criteria for depressive unipolar disorders.…
- Subjects
BARCELONA (Spain); SPAIN; CONTENT analysis; DEPRESSED persons; PERSONAL construct theory
- Publication
Salud Mental, 2009, Vol 32, Issue 5, p371
- ISSN
0185-3325
- Publication type
Article