THE COGNITIVE-BEHAVIOURAL MODEL

1. THE COGNITIVE-BEHAVIOURAL MODEL

2. Beh Perspective was a reaction to the subjectivism of an earlier era in Psychology. • Behaviourist wanted to banish private mental events from Psychological study because they were in observable and therefore insuitable for scientific research. • Some behaviourist even refused to use such terms as mind and thought. • Ironically, this viewpoint was challenged for its shortcomings by its own members as well as by psychologists, psychiatrist of psychodynamic tradition. • The challenge was centered around the claim of behaviourist that covert mental or cognitive processes could not be studied scientifically simply because they were unobservable. • Since 1950’s psychologists and some learning theorists focused on cognitive processes and their impact on

3. behaviour. 7. Cognitive Psychology involves the study of basic information- processing mechanisms such as attention, perception, learning and memory as well as higher mental processes such as thinking, planning and decision making. 8. The emphasis is on understanding the normal or abnormal individual as a whole, which includes both his overt and covert behaviour. 9. This viewpoint was against mechanistic nature of behavioural viewpoint. 10. This viewpoint was against behaviourism because of its failure to recognize the importance of mental processes as well as their influence on our emotions and behaviour. 11. The developments in cognitive viewpoint were led by

4. individuals who were formerly identified with behavioural tradition in clinical Psychology. 12. The cognitive or cognitive behavioural perspective on abnormal beh focuses on how thoughts and information processing can become distorted and lead to maladaptive emotions and behaviour. 13. Unlike behaviourism focus on overt behaviour, the cognitive view treats thoughts as behaviours and believed that they can be studied empirically and can be utilized in the treatment of the patient. For example a women who is depressed and asked to express the thoughts running through her head might respond I can never do anything right. 14. The patterns of distorted information processing can be exhibited by people with various psychopathology and it is helpful in studying that mechanism which is involved in the

5. maintenance of certain disorders, for example depressed individuals show memory biases favouring memory for negative information relative to positive or neutral information. Such biases are likely to help reinforce or maintain one’s current depressed state. 15. The Pioneering work of John Dollard (1900) and Neal Miller (1909) focused on cognitive concepts to explain abnormal behaviour. They considered cognition- for example, using symbolic processes to visualize and label emotions and problems. 16. Another pioneering theorist, George Kelly (1905-1966) contributed substantially to the cognitive viewpoint. Kelly developed a personality theory in which he postulated that people build personality constructs- uniquely individual ways of perceiving other people and events. People then use these personal constructs to interpret events around them. For

6. example, the way a person describes or interprets a comment made by an acquaintance can produce emotional upset even though the comment was neutral and not intended to hurt. It is the meaning an individual attaches filtered through his or her own personal constructs, thus results in negative feelings and an emotional reaction. 17. Albert Bandura(1925), a learning theorist who developed cognitive behavioural perspective, placed emphasis on cognitive aspects of learning. Bandura stressed that human beings regulate their beh by internal symbolic processes-thoughts. Acc to him, they learn by internal reinforcement. We prepare ourselves for difficult times by visualizing What the consequences would be if we did not perform them. That’s why we take our automobiles to the garage in the fall and have antifreeze checked because we can see ourselves stranded on a road in winter. It shows we do not always require external reinforcement to change our beh patterns, rather with our

7. cognitive abilities, we can solve many problems internally. Bandura stated that human beings have “a capacity for self direction.” He later on developed a theory of “Self-Efficacy”- the belief that you can achieve desired goal. • 18. Attribution, Attribution style and psychopathology • Attribution theory has also contributed significantly to the cognitive-behavioral approach (Anderson et al., 1996; Fiske and Taylor 1991) • Attributions refers to the process of assigning causes to things that happen. • We may attribute cause to external events such as rewards and punishment for example:- (“He did it for money”) • We may assume that causes are internal. They derive from traits within ourselves or others. A student who fails may attribute the failure to lack of intelligence (personal trait) or to ambiguous list question or unclear directions (environmental causes).

8. Cognitive psychologists believe that our attribution style is strongly associated with psychopathology. • Attribution style is our characteristics way of looking at things for example:-depressed people tend to attribute bad events to internal stable and global causes (“I failed the test because I’ m stupid “)as opposed to (I failed the test because teacher was in bad mood or graded it unfairly”). • However inaccurate our attributions may be, they become important part of our view of the world and can have significant effect on our emotional well being. • Attribution style can also make us see other people and ourselves as unchanging and unchangeable, leading us to be inflexible in our relationships (Abramson et al., 1978; Buchanan and Seligman, 1995).

9. 19. Aaron Beck (1920) adapted the concept of “schemas” from cognitive psychology. A “schema” is an underlying representation of knowledge that guides the current processing of information and often leads to distortion in attention ,memory and comprehension. 20. Different forms of psychopathology are characterized by different maladaptive schemas. This is due to adverse early learning experiences, that leads to distortion in thinking and may lead to anxiety, depression and personality disorder. 21. Beck’s list of Cognitive Distortions:- 1. Overgeneralization :- If one thing is true in one case, then in any other situation if one of the element is similar to the previous situation one starts generalization without going into details for example:- If a person does not score good in one subject he starts thinking that he is going to perform badly in all exams. 2. Selective Abstraction :- The person arrives at the conclusion only on the basis of those element of the situation

10. which are negative or which matches with one’s negative assumptions for example :- A player may evaluate one self on the basis of his mistakes only. 3. Excessive Responsibility :- This is based on the assumption that I am responsible for all negative events or bad events for example :- A player may start thinking that the team has faced defeat due to his ill luck or due to him. 4. Temporal Causality :- This distortion is based on the idea that any thing which was true in past will be definitely true in future even though there is no genuine reason for that. 5. Self References :- This is based on the assumption that I am the center of everyone’s attraction, everyone is making reference to me or everyone is evaluating me. 6. Catastrophizing :- Here an individual start thinking that some bad event is going to happen or some acute problem is about to come. 7. Dischotomous Thinking :- The person start thinking on the extreme ends either the person starts evaluating the things as

11. too good or too bad. 8. Magnification and Minimization :- In this type of cognitive distortion , the person starts under evaluating his strengths and over evaluate his defects for example:- He does not give regards to his achievements and over emphasizes his minor or trifle defects. Such cognitive errors lead to maladaptive behaviour, depression and many other psychopathologies and need to be corrected. 22. Fundamental to this model is the idea that the way we interpret events and experiences determines our emotional reactions to them. For example :- you are sitting in the living room and hear a crash in an adjacent room, if you remember that, you have left the window open and there was vase on the table .You will assume that gust of wind must knocked over your favorite vase and you will be annoyed with yourself for being careless but on the other hand, you do not know that

12. window is open , you may conclude that some burglar has climbed in and the emotional reaction will be “fear”. Thus your interpretation of the same event (hearing a crash in the next room) fundamentally determines your emotional reaction to it. • IMPACT OF COGNITIVE –BEHAVIOURAL MODEL :- • Merits :- • Beck’s work had a greatest impact on the development of cognitive-behavioral treatment approaches. He is considered to be the founder of cognitive therapies. • 2. Due to this model, the focus shifted from overt beh to underlying cognitions, which determine beh. They believed that by altering human beh through changing the way people think about themselves and others , we can alter maladaptive beh. • 3. This model had a powerful impact on contemporary clinical psychology.

13. 4. This model focused on the self statements , complaints and problems of the client directly rather than on intrapsychic conflicts and complexes of childhood as in psychodynamic model. • 5. This model provided us with cognitive behavioral therapies which proved to be very useful in altering the maladaptive one such as Albert Ellis’s Relational Emotive Therapy and Beck’s Cognitive Behavioral Therapy . • Demerits :- • Many traditional behaviorists were skeptical of the cognitive-behavioral viewpoint. • 2. The behaviorist were against cognitions because they are not observable phenomenon and can not provide us solid empirical data.

14. 3. Skinner (1990) , in his last major address remained true to behaviorism. Although , Skinner is gone, this debate will surely continue. Another behaviorist Wolpe remained highly critical of the cognitive model until his death in 1997. THANK YOU