Psychological

Various aspects of personality and its development appear to be integral to the occurrence and persistence of depression. Although depressive episodes are strongly correlated with adverse events, a person's characteristic style of coping may be correlated with their resilience.Additionally, low self-esteem and self-defeating or distorted thinking are related to depression. Depression may be less likely to occur, as well as quicker to remit, among those who are religious. It is not always clear which factors are causes or which are effects of depression; however, depressed persons who are able to make corrections in their thinking patterns often show improved mood and self-esteem.

American psychiatrist Aaron T. Beck developed what is now known as a cognitive model of depression in the early 1960s. He proposed three concepts which underlie depression: a triad of negative thoughts comprising cognitive errors about oneself, one's world, and one's future; recurrent patterns of depressive thinking, or schemas; and distorted information processing.From these principles, he developed the structured technique of cognitive behavioral therapy. According to American psychologist Martin Seligman, depression in humans is similar to learned helplessness in laboratory animals, who remain in unpleasant situations when they are able to escape, but do not because they initially learned they had no control.

Depressed individuals often blame themselves for negative events. In a study of hospitalized adolescents with self-reported depression, those who felt responsible for negative events did not take credit for positive outcomes. This tendency is characteristic of a depressive attributional, or pessimistic explanatory style. According to Albert Bandura, a Canadian social psychologist associated with social cognitive theory, depressed individuals have negative beliefs about themselves, based on experiences of failure, observing the failure of social models, a lack of social persuasion that they can succeed, and their own somatic and emotional states including tension and stress. These influences may result in a negative self-concept and a perceived lack of self-efficacy; that is, they do not believe they can influence events or achieve personal goals.

An examination of depression in women indicates that vulnerability factors—such as early maternal loss, lack of a confiding relationship, responsibility for the care of several young children at home, and unemployment—can interact with life stressors to increase the risk of depression.^] For older adults, the factors are often health problems, changes in relationships with a spouse or adult children due to the transition to a care-giving or care-needing role, the death of a significant other, or a change in the availability or quality of social relationships with older friends because of their own health-related life changes.

The understanding of depression has also received contributions from the psychoanalytic, existential, and humanistic branches of psychology. From the classical psychoanalytic perspective of Austrian psychiatrist Sigmund Freud, depression, or melancholia, may be related to interpersonal loss and early life experiences. Existential psychologists have connected depression to the lack of both meaning in the present and a vision of the future. The founder of humanistic psychology, American psychologist Abraham Maslow, suggested that depression could arise when people are unable to self-actualize, or to realize their full potential.