Centre For

Cognitive
Technologies
Pte Ltd
 
 
 

Resilience  Workshop  
 
Negative Beliefs/Schemas
In general, there are 2 types of human thoughts. One is known as
“Beliefs/Schemas” and the other is known as “Automatic Thoughts”.
1) Schemas/ beliefs are patterns of beliefs and concept that are
permanent in our mind. They serve to summarize and interpret our
experience of the world and guide our emotional and Behaviour
responses.
2) Automatic thoughts are transient thoughts (e.g. sentences, phrases,
images etc) that occur in our consciousness. Psychologists discovered
that most of us tend to have negative thoughts rather than positive
thoughts; we refer to such negative thoughts as Automatic Negative
Thoughts or ANTS for short.

Techniques for Combating Automatic Negative Thoughts and

Beliefs
Technique 1: Thinking/ Explanatory Style is the way you tend to explain
Adversity - it is both habitual and automatic.
Me 1 2 3 4 5 Not Me
Due to me Due to other people or
circumstances

Always 1 2 3 4 5 Not Always

Will always be Will not be present again
present in my life in my life

Everything 1 2 3 4 5 Not Everything

Affects many areas Affects only specific
in my life areas in my life
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Cognitive
Technologies
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Technique 2: Thinking Errors are flaws in logic in our thought process that
must be countered with appropriate logic. The first step is to identify the
Thinking Errors, and then choose an appropriate logic to substitute the bad
logic.
1) More dire than justified - you conclude a situation is worse than it
really is.
2) Unjustified Negative Prediction - you predict that things will turn out
worse than is likely when all relevant information is considered.
3) Overgeneralisation - you take a minor example and conclude that it
applies to all cases.
4) Black and white thinking - you think about events or people only in
extreme terms: either totally good or bad.
5) Invalid allocation of responsibility - allocating disproportionate
amount of responsibility for negative events either to yourself or
another.
6) Mind reading - thinking you know what another person is thinking or
the reason for another’s behaviour.
7) Biased weighting - you bias the information relating to one situation or
person or one source, positively or negatively.
8) Ignoring facts - you select only the facts that support one conclusion,
usually the negative conclusion.
9) False absolutes - you use absolute words such as ‘never’, ‘always’,
‘everyone’, ‘everything’ etc when inconsistent events or situations are
possible.
10) Must or should statements - you arbitrarily specify that certain events
are to happen or are to happen under certain circumstances, when
there is no process to cause them to happen.
11) Emotional reasoning - you conclude that something is good or bad
because it feels that way to you.