In Beck's depressive triad, negative beliefs about the world refer to

• A. Health, wealth, and happiness.
• B. Past, present, and future.
• C. Self, world, and future.
• D. Causation by external factors.

Answer: (C)

Beck's depressive triad includes three domains of negative beliefs: about the self, about the world, and about the future. When we talk about negative beliefs about the world, we’re focusing on how the person interprets their external environment—the people, situations, and life conditions around them. They may see the world as unjust, unresponsive, or unsupportive, and they interpret events as evidence that things won’t ever get better or that they can’t rely on others. This worldview helps sustain depression by fueling hopelessness and reinforcing withdrawal and rumination.

In practice, this differs from choices that focus on health, wealth, and happiness as a general list of valued domains (not the cognitive pattern), or from a purely temporal focus on past, present, and future (which is about time rather than the external world). It also isn’t about attributing causation to external factors in the sense of attributional style, which is a separate cognitive pattern. The key idea is that the world component centers on beliefs about the external environment and how life is experienced as unfair or unsupportive, which feeds depressive thinking.