ponses by others to one's own behaviors. Such expectancies influence one's behaviors, and also are susceptible to systematic distortion. The third category of cognitive phenomena includes one's unrealistic and irrational beliefs about the nature of one's relationships both to others and to one's environment. Such irrational beliefs may result in dysfunctional behavioral responses (DeGenova, 1993, pp. 191-201).
Systematic distortion related to one's automatic thoughts occurs through a variety of thought behaviors (Adelmann, 1994, pp. S277-S285). The most frequent of these thought behaviors are over generalization--an assumption that the behavior of oneself and others will be invariant, arbitrary inference--jumping to conclusions, selective abstraction--where one ignores a part of the available information, and all-or-nothing thinking--where one accepts only the extremes of a continuum as an explanation for the behavior of another. Biased attributions in one's automatic thoughts are significant because they can elicit a sense of hopelessness and helplessness regarding improvement of problems being experienced (Gannon, Vaux, Rhodes, and Luchetta, 1992, pp. 288-301).
Expectancies involve estimates of the probabilities that one will behave in certain ways in certain situations (Adelmann, 1994, pp. S277-S285). Thus, one's expectancies influence one's own behaviors because the tendency is for an individual to choose actions that will most likely produce desired consequences, based on past experiences. If one's expectancies are distorted or unrealistic, however, it is less likely that appropriate behavioral choices will be made. Distorted and unrealistic expectancies are, in part, the product of one's schemata, or set of unrealistic and irrational beliefs.
Cognitive theory holds that extreme beliefs with respect to one's self and one's interaction with one's environment are among the most important of the cognitive phenomena le...