Andrea Yates Cognitive Perspective

On the morning of June 20, 2001, Andrea Yates murdered all five of her children by drowning them in her household’s bathtub while her husband was away. After the birth of her 4th child, Yates became diagnosed with postpartum depression and this carried on after the birth of her 5th. Yates indicated the killing of her children was due to the fact that she was seeing violent images and hearing voices telling her to get a knife, or even hearing a voice she believed to be the devil that told her he was after her children. Such voices can be explained by the psychodynamic perspective that Yates’ behavior of killing her children was a result of these unconscious voices that were demanding her to take such violent action. Growing obsessively religious over the years, Yates followed extreme Christian views presented by the

Cognitive perspective is how we encode, process, store and retrieve information, and Yates harshly interpreted and followed the Woroniecki’s extreme style of christianity. The Woroniecki’s often spoke of how children not raised correctly were bound to go to the devil, along with the mother who raised them, so Andrea processed this information in a way that led her to believe the only way to save her children was to kill them while they were still innocent. Yates’ following of the Woroniecki’s also goes along with the behavioral perspective that Yates’ killed her children because she learned the way the Woroniecki’s lived and interpreted christianity, and consequently followed in their extreme footsteps. She observed their behavior and in return displayed that severe behavior through murdering her children. From a biological perspective, the murder of her children can be blamed on her diagnosed postpartum depression, which lead her to engage in obsessive thoughts over her children along with constant depressive