How does Cognitive Therapy Work?
Cognitive Therapy is based on the early work of Martin Seligman, who in 1967 was researching human depression. Seligman proposed that human beings and animals show symptoms of depression because they have ‘learned’ to believe that their situation is helpless or that there is nothing that they can do to avoid a bad situation. His experiments involved dogs. The dogs were left in a room, where through the floor they could be zapped with an uncomfortable electric shock. The room was divided in half by a low wall which the dogs could jump over – the floor on the other side of the wall could be charged with a shock or not. Some of Seligman’s experimental dogs were given the ability to escape the shock by jumping over the wall to the floor where the shock was not present, while others were shocked regardless of which side of the wall they were on. What Seligman found was that many of the dogs which could not escape the shock showed an odd behaviour over time – they did nothing to avoid it: so
