Quickly Assess Your Clients for Five Types of Cognitive Distortion Including Low Self-Esteem
The CDS is a 40-item self-assessment of cognitive distortions for adults ages 18 years and older.
The CDS scales reflect five types of cognitive distortion:
What are cognitive distortions?
It is a general principle of psychology that people operate in the world based on, to a large extent, assumptions about themselves, others, the environment, and the future. When these assumptions or attributions are inaccurate, unnecessarily negative, and interfere with optimal functioning, they often are referred to as cognitive distortions or dysfunctional thinking patterns. The most common are:
Why was the CDS developed?
It was developed in response to a paucity of standardized, multi-scale clinical tests of cognitive distortion. It measures a range of cognitive symptoms, is not specifically tied to a traumatic event, and generates meaningful standardized T scores based on normative data from a large sample of individuals from the general population. In addition to a self esteem scale (Self-Criticism), it evaluates four other, less commonly assessed cognitive distortions that appear to have significant clinical impact. The CDS was engineered to be brief (40 items) and easily understood by the average mental health client, to have strong psychometric properties, and to be applicable to a variety of clinical problems and etiologies.