Depression Can Be Contagious

How we perceive stressful events, interpret them, and process them has a major impact on our ability to cope adaptively with them. For example, people with cognitive vulnerabilities might perceive events more negatively, feel more helpless about them, and ruminate about them, while non-cognitively vulnerable people might see the same events as less dire, feel less paralyzed by them, take them less personally and respond to them more positively.