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|b Knowledge is regarded as the man's device to understand his self and the external world surrounding him and to arrive at the realities of things, and the development of human mind is the man's way to control things and when this knowledge is disordered and distorted, it will not result in happiness and healing, but will result in illness and misery. Hence, the cognitists sees that the cognitive distortion and deviation of thinking from the self, the world and the future lay behind the evolution and continuity of neurosis symptoms when he resorts to amplify the negatives, underestimate the positives, generalize the failure, expect disasters, blame the self and exaggerate in standards, all of which are associated with the cognitive formation of the individual, how he perceive it and explain it. The concept of cognitive distortion is considered as one of the most important cognitive concepts, the most effective and the most illustrative of many cognitive and psychological disorders in the modern cognitive attitude, which was discovered by the American psychologist Aaron Beck where he assures that the meaning added by the individual on the incidences as well as his perception and explanation of them do not affect his emotion and behavior only, but also his view to his self, his world and his future, but rather they determine the extent of his health or psychological disorder, consequently, Beck became convinced by the cognitive analysis of the disordered thoughts, his attitudes, his expectations and what he adds on the incidences and situations of indications and meanings; therefore, Beck model in cognitive distortions is considered one of the most genuine and effective cognitive models, for he sees that disorder is resulted from the way the individual thinks, how he treats what he perceive of information, what he thinks and how he explains the events and realities around him, all of which represent important factors that affect the generation of disorder for it gives the cognitive distortions a precedence generation of any disorder and the behavioral symptoms and emotional changes accompany it which is based on a cognitive triple of negative thoughts about the self, the world and the future which function as internal powers distorting and deviating all what the individual wants in the passive direction which makes the individual distort the reality and twist the truths according to wrong introductions and mistaken assumptions which arise from incorrect learning occurred at one of cognitive development stages, i.e. the individual provides incidences distortion in accordance with his passive beliefs of his self, making him look at his self as being characterized with topless, failure and insufficiency and he controlled by a feeling of defect and this view extends to include the life. Beck also affirms that cognitive distortions work as negative formulas in amplifying the negatives and failure aspects, ignore the positives and underestimate them and these negative thoughts increase the distortion, lead the individual interact in exaggerated ways, make him less motivated and more negative, avoiding, escaping and desisting, making the individual feel unable and desperate. Beck defined four levels of cognitive distortions; the essential beliefs are closed and inert beliefs on the self, the world and the future and are a negative conception towards the self and a negative explanation of life experiences and non-optimism towards the future, middle beliefs consist of attitudes, rules, situations, assumptions and schemata including the basic information, concepts and formulas acquired by the individual through the development stages and the negative schemata which are resulted in negative organized biases in explaining and recalling the experiences, while the positive schemata become less important. As to spontaneous thoughts, they are the ultimate outcome of the cognitive process which is a current and a stream of thoughts and interpretations coming to the mind unwillingly and unconsciously or without a prior thinking, and they are sometimes shown with the apparent context of thoughts. The research aims are defined to the following aspects: 1- Measuring the cognitive distortions for the academic students. 2- Measuring the differences in the cognitive distortions according to two variables, the sex (males- females) and specialty (scientific-humanitarian). The research sample consisted of (400) male and female students and was selected by the random class method from eight colleges at the University of Baghdad, four colleges of humanitarian specialty and four colleges of scientific specialty. To achieve the research aims, the research adopted the scale of cognitive distortions for Aaron Beck including (45) items. At the present research, the translation validity and the facial validity were extracted and the scale items were subjected to analysis by the style of two extremist groups and the relationship of the item with the total score of the scale. (6) Items were deleted; therefore, (39) items were accepted which were characterized with the indicators of facial validity and construction validity, too. The reliability coefficient was verified by the method of internal consistency (Alfa Cronbach coefficient), thus it was (0.87) and by the split half method, thus it was (0.73), then it was corrected by the equation of Spearman Brown, thus it was (0.80) and by retest, thus it was (0.81). The research concluded that: 1- The academic students had low cognitive distortions. 2- There were differences in the cognitive distortions according to two variables, the sex (males- females) for the interest of males and specialty (scientific-humanitarian) for the interest of humanitarian. Finally, the research was ended by presenting a number of recommendations and suggestions.
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