CDS™

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:

• Low self-esteem
• Tendency to blame oneself for negative events beyond one’s control
• A general sense of helplessness regarding unwanted events in one’s life
• A belief that the future is inevitably bleak and hopeless
• An overestimation of the amount of danger or adversity in the world

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.

Test structure

• CDS materials include the professional manual, the test booklet, and the profile form. The professional manual provides information on administration, scoring, interpretation, psychometric characteristics, normative data on the standardization sample, as well as data from subsamples of psychotherapy outpatients.
• The carbonless test booklet can be administered in 10-15 minutes to individuals or groups. Respondents use a 5-point scale to rate the frequency of occurrence of each item during the previous month. Hand-scoring takes only 5 minutes.
• The CDS profile form allows conversion of raw scale scores to T scores based on the gender of the respondent. A profile graph can be drawn to portray the respondent's scores relative to the scores of the general population.
• The CDS requires only minimal (5th grade) reading level.

Technical information

• The normative sample included 611 individuals from the general population.
• The CDS has demonstrated construct, convergent, and discriminant validity in both the general population and in clinical samples. Studies suggest that individuals with a history of child abuse or later personal trauma are especially likely to score in the clinical range on the CDS scales.
• Data presented in the CDS Professional Manual support use of this instrument in clinical and nonclinical contexts with adults who have no significant trauma history and those who have been traumatized.