Good Mood: The New Psychology
of Overcoming Depression

APPENDIX

Self-comparison is the link between cognition and emotion -- that is, between what you think and what you feel. This traditional joke highlights the nature of the mechanism: A salesman is a person with a shine on his shoes, a a smile on his face, and a lousy territory. So imagine yourself a saleswoman with a lousy territory.

You might first think: I'm more entitled to that territory than Charley is. You then feel anger, perhaps toward the boss who favored Charley. If your anger focuses instead on the person who has the other territory, the pattern is called envy.

But you might also think: I can, and will, work hard and sell so much much that the boss will give me a better territory. In that state of mind you simply feel a mobilization of your human resources toward attaining the object of the comparison.

Or instead you might think: There is no way that I can ever do anything that will get me a better territory, because Charley and other people sell better than I do. Or you think that lousy territories are always given to women. If so, you feel sad and worthless, the pattern of depression, because you have no hope of improving your situation.

Or you may think: I only have this lousy territory another week, after which I move to a terrific territory. Now you are shifting the comparison in your mind from a) your versus another's territory, to b) your territory now versus your territory next week. The latter comparison is not consistent with depression.

Or still another possible line of thought: No one else could put up with such a lousy territory and still make any sales at all. Now you are shifting from a) the comparison of territories, to b) the comparison of your strength with that of other people. Now you feel pride, and not depression.

Cognitive therapy dovetails with the recent broad movement toward regarding individuals as responsible for themselves rather than as being automatons of social forces. For example, this anti-authoritarian pro-freedom trend in thought appears in criminology's shift away from social causation in its view of how to reform criminals, and in economics' evidence that private property rights better motivate individuals to produce than do collective incentives. Whereas in traditional Freudian therapy the analyst is a father figure who always knows best, in cognitive therapy -- especially when carried out by oneself without a therapist -- the individual determines his or her own fate in cognitive-behavioral therapy.

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