Exceptional Canadian Contributions to Research on Cognitive Vulnerability to Depression

For more than four decades, Canadian psychologists have made significant contributions to the understanding of cognitive vulnerability to depression. This article highlights some of these exceptional contributions and the important roles Canadian scientists have played in enhancing our understanding of the cognitive products (e.g., dysfunctional attitudes), cognitive operations/processes (e.g., attention, encoding, and memory biases), and cognitive structures (i.e., cognitive organization) involved in depression. Following this review, we discuss research that has integrated cognitive vulnerability with other risk factors for depression, address some important measurement issues in cognitive vulnerability research, and highlight directions for future research. Public Significance Statement This article reviews some of the exceptional contributions that Canadian psychologists have made to understanding cognitive vulnerability to depression over the past four decades. We review research ranging from more surface-level negative thinking, to information processing biases (e.g., selective attention to, or enhanced recall of, negative content), to understanding deeper beliefs (e.g., the organization of information and core beliefs about self). We also provide several important suggestions for the next generation of cognitive vulnerability research, including developing more integrative models, refining the measurement of various constructs, testing causal mechanisms, and validating culturally sensitive models of cognitive vulnerability to depression.