lecture 5- cognitive approaches Flashcards
(15 cards)
Principles of the cognitive approach:
- Processes such as perception, attention, memory, recognition, reasoning and judgement shape our behaviour and the emotions we experience.
- If they become dysfunctional or distorted, this leads to maladaptive emotions and behaviour
- Tries to make understanding in how people structure their experiences and make sense of them.
Looking at what happens between stimulus and response by incorporating thoughts.
Albert Ellis: Rational-Emotive Behaviour therapy
He developed the ABC theory of human disturbance,
- Private beliefs about particular activating events or situations determine the emotional or behavioural consequences (distress)
- Depends on how we cognitively process events rather than the event itself
The therapy encourages people to be aware of the fact that they have choice of their beliefs and restructure belief structure to a healthy and realistic one
- Irrational beliefs cause maladaptive behaviour and psychological disorders.
Adaptive functioning is achieved when behaving rationally and in line with reality.
Aaron Beck: Cognitive Therapy
- Patients with depression showed cognitive biases and cognitive distortions against themselves
- He claimed the core of the problem is the way of thinking, and where the incorrect thinking was pointed out, symptoms decreased (dysfunctional thoughts)
- Cognitive therapy for depression, anxiety and other disorders
To help patients to challenge their thoughts and find alternative thinking.
Aaron beck on the negative/cognitive triad
Negative automatic thoughts about:
Self, world and the future
Negative events trigger these thoughts.
What is the difference between Beck and Ellis
Beck focused more on changing and challenging the thoughts, rather than replacing them. Beck looked at changing their thinking patterns.
The information-processing model:
- Beck and Ellis were influenced by this model:
○ Information taken in from the environment is processed by a series of cognitive processes of attention, memory and appraisal
○ Problems result from biased processing of external events or internal stimuli.
Leading to cognitive errors.
What are the 3 Cognitive biases:
1) Attention bias:
Frequent in anxiety disorders, allocating greater attention to threat related stimuli
As well as depression, where they pay attention to more negative stimuli (Roiser et al 2012)
2) Memory bias:
Those with depression struggle to remember positive memories
3) Appraisal bias:
Anxiety can cause people to interpret situations as more threatening (Craske et al 2009)
What are schemas
A cognitive framework consisting of knowledge, beliefs and assumptions about the world. Information is retrieved quickly.
They are activated by experiences and help us to organise, categorise and understand the world to produce rapid and automatic cognitive/ emotional responses
How are new experiences incorporated into existing schemas?
1) Assimilation: incorporate new experiences into existing cognitive frameworks.
- Even if new information has to be reinterpreted or distorted to make it fit.
- Results in clinging to existing assumptions and rejecting new information that contradicts them
2) Accommodation: changing existing schema to incorporate new information that does not fit
- More difficult and threatening
- This is the basic goal of cognitive and cognitive-behavioural therapies
What are the 3 core types of schemas in regards to mental health
Ones related to:
1) Self
2) The future
3) The world
Positive aspect: enable us to focus on relevant information among influx of information available
Negative aspect: also a source of psychological vulnerability if distorted and inaccurate
What are the 10 cognitive distortions/ errors
1) Labelling: generalising others or self, based on one event/ characteristics
2) Personalisation: blaming self for something not entirely your fault
3) All of nothing thinking: either complete success or failure
4) Over-generalising: finding patterns and being overly broad in conclusions drawn
5) Mental filter: only paying attention to certain types of evidence
6) Disqualifying the positive: discounting the good things that happened
7) Jumping to conclusions
○ Mind-reading (imagining we know what people are thinking)
○ Fortune telling (predicting the future)
8) Magnification: blowing things out of proportion (catastrophising) or making something seem insignificant
9) Emotional reasoning: assuming that because we feel a certain way, what we think must be true
Use of critical words: like must and should to make us feel guilty
Explain Cognitive Behavioural therapy
Collaborative relationship to help the clients, to change fundamental core beliefs schemas and how they interpret life events.
- Working with therapist towards a common goal, both should be actively participating
- Goal-orientated and problem focused.
- Based on evidence and empirical evaluation
- Practical approach orientated to changing behaviour rather than trying to understand dynamics of personality
- Dysfunctional behaviour results from distorted thinking and biased information processing.
What 5 techniques are used in CBT
○ Psychoeducation: explaining how the therapy is going to work and why therapist is doing what they are doing
○ Behavioural activation: increase engagement with adaptive activities (pleasure and rewarding)
○ Behavioural experiments: test clients beliefs
○ Exposure: for anxiety and fear, repeatedly face something that causes fear
○ Cognitive restructuring: changing one’s views
What are the limitations of CBT
- Takes lots of time and can differ from 6 weeks to 6 months depending on the problem and how it is working for the client
- Therapists role is to just support and encourage, the client must be heavily involved and willing which many may struggle with for example due to anxiety
- The availability to CBT may be a problem in remote areas
- Symptoms may return and so it is important to keep practising CBT skills even when feeling better to prevent a relapse
