Concepts
Health psychology/Cognitive distortions · CBT distortion
Labelling
What it means
Attaching a fixed, global negative label to oneself or others instead of describing the specific behaviour.
Worked example
"I’m a loser" rather than "I made a mistake".
In the exam
After one error on the ward, a nurse concludes "I’m a terrible nurse" rather than "I made a mistake I can learn from."
What settles it
Labelling defines the whole self by an event. Overgeneralisation extends one event into a temporal pattern rather than an identity.
Classically confused with
Overgeneralisation
Source: Burns; CBT