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Cognitive Components of Depression

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Handbook of Developmental Psychopathology

Abstract

Current thinking regarding childhood psycho-pathology stresses the necessity of viewing psycho-pathology from a developmental perspective. Cicchetti and Schneider-Rosen (1984), for example, argue that psychopathology in children should be looked at in terms of failure to negotiate important tasks of social-cognitive competency in the sequence of childhood development. Stage-relevant task mastery is seen as the mechanism by which children progress to new levels of cognitive organization and differentiation. Cognitive reorganization is seen as a process whereby prior levels of organization are subsumed under new hierachies of cognitive structure. As such, failure to negotiate one developmental task has relevance for mastery of subsequent stages and thus implications for later social-cognitive competence on into adulthood.

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Rehm, L.P., Carter, A.S. (1990). Cognitive Components of Depression. In: Lewis, M., Miller, S.M. (eds) Handbook of Developmental Psychopathology. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4615-7142-1_26

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