This study examines beliefs about the ontological status of social categories, asking whether their members are understood to share fixed, inhering essences or natures. Forty social categories were rated on nine elements of essentialism. These elements formed two independent dimensions, representing the degrees to which categories are understood as natural kinds and as coherent entities with inhering cores ('entitativity' or reification), respectively. Reification was negatively associated with categories' evaluative status, especially among those categories understood to be natural kinds. Essentialism is not a unitary syndrome of social beliefs, and is not monolithically associated with devaluation and prejudice, but it illuminates several aspects of social categorization.

Gordon Allport (1954) proposed that belief in group essences is one aspect of the prejudiced personality, alongside a rigid, dichotomous and ambiguity-intolerant cognitive style. We examined whether essentialist beliefs-beliefs that a social category has a fixed, inherent, identity-defining nature-are indeed associated in this fashion with prejudice towards black people, women and gay men. Allport's claim, which is mirrored by many contemporary social theorists, received partial support but had to be qualified in important respects. Essence-related beliefs were associated strongly with anti-gay attitudes but only weakly with sexism and racism, and they did not reflect a cognitive style that was consistent across stigmatized categories. When associations with prejudice were obtained, only a few specific beliefs were involved, and some anti-essentialist beliefs were associated with anti-gay attitudes. Nevertheless, the powerful association that essence-related beliefs had with anti-gay attitudes was independent of established prejudice-related traits, indicating that they have a significant role to play in the psychology of prejudice.

Studies testing cognitive theory of depression (Beck, 1963, 1987) and defining depression as a clinical syndrome are reviewed. Many aspects of the theory's descriptive claims about depressive thinking have been substantiated empirically, including (a) increased negativity of cognitions about the self, (b) increased hopelessness, (c) specificity of themes of loss to depressive syndromes rather than psychopathology in general, and (d) mood-congruent recall. Evidence that depressive thinking is especially inaccurate or illogical, however, is weak. Fewer studies have tested the theory's causal (diathesis-stress) hypotheses, and there is no strong evidence supporting them.

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