NCE Counseling and Helping Relationships Practice Test 2026 - Free NCE Practice Questions and Study Guide

Beck’s approach centers on how negative automatic thoughts arise from deeper faulty beliefs and distorted processing, and how these thoughts help sustain depressive symptoms. He did not view automatic thoughts as the initial cause of depression; instead, they reflect a negative shift in thinking that maintains the illness by shaping how a person experiences and interprets events. Therefore, describing the core idea as a negative cognitive shift occurring in the person’s thinking best matches his view. The other ideas don’t fit as well: Beck’s work did not simply build on Ellis’s ideas, depression isn’t primarily tied to interpersonal factors in his theory, and reciprocal inhibition belongs to a different behavioral framework.