Psychological Perspectives - Cognitive Approach

Aaron Beck (1921-Present day) believes that a person’s reaction to specific upsetting thoughts may actually contribute to abnormality. As we confront the many situations that arise in life, both comforting and upsetting thoughts come into our heads. Beck calls these unbidden cognition’s automatic thoughts. Cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) was created due to beck and it can be used to treat people with a wide range of different mental health problems. CBT is based on the idea that how we think (cognition), how we feel (emotion) and how we act (behaviour), all interact together. Specifically, our thoughts determine our feelings and our behaviour and can form a destructive cycle. He devised six different steps to do so: 1) Identify a behaviour that they wish to improve or change, 2) monitor the baseline behaviour, 3) learn about recommendations for the targeted behaviour, 4) set goals for themselves, 5) Implement a self-improvement plan, and finally, 6) perform a self-assessment of effectiveness and identify factors that either promoted, or hindered their goals.

The way that cognitive psychology view and study behaviour is that it primarily focuses on the different ways that human’s process information, looking at how we treat information that comes in to the person (stimuli), and how this treatment leads to responses. In other words, how the stimulus/input creates a response/output. Cognitive psychologists study the internal processes including perception, attention, language, memory and thinking. There is the idea that the mind works in a very similar way to a computer i.e. inputting, storing and retrieving data.

Cognitive psychology can be used in many different health and social care settings. Piaget’s theories are used as it is influential in education and teaching, the idea that children are capable of adapting and learning from their environment. Abnormal behaviour can be helped by using cognitive therapy or cognitive behavioural therapy, where by the thoughts affect feelings which effects behaviour. Identifying irrational and/or negative thoughts are viewed as being helped by recording instances of negative thoughts or by writing in a diary on a regular basis. Then asking questions such as, ‘are there alternative explanations for thoughts?’, ‘How does it affect me?’ ‘What type of errors am I making?’, can help service users to rationalise their thoughts and see them from a different perspective. Learning difficulties are also another aspect where the cognitive approach can be helpful as by identifying irrational thoughts, individuals can be guided to change them, CT can improve self esteem and reduce outbursts which may stem from not being able to understand. cognitive psychology sub-topics

Strengths of this approach are that it is scientific, highly applicable (e.g. therapy), it combines easily with other approaches and many studies supports the theory.

Limitations include that it ignores biology (e.g. testosterone) and that the experiments have a low ecological validity