Cognitive Therapy (Shapiro Ch. 3) Flashcards
What is the focus of cognitive therapy?
focuses on people’s thinking and the effects of their thoughts on their emotions and behavior.
What are the ABC’s of emotion?
What is rational emotive therapy (RET)?
based on the idea that psychological disturbances are caused by irrational thinking and, therefore, treatment that strengthens the rationality of clients’ thinking will lead to the resolution of their disturbances.
What is cognitive therapy?
is based on the idea that human life is largely interpretive: Events have different emotional effects on different people, depending on how they interpret the events
What are the 3 levels of cognition?
- self talk (or automatic thoughts)
- intermediate beliefs
- schemas or core beliefs.
What is self talk?
The running commentary that goes through our minds from moment to moment in a habitual, unexamined way. Automatic thoughts can involve visual images as well as words.
Vance often had the automatic thought, “I just can’t be happy without Kelsey.”
What are intermediate beliefs?
are the general rules, attitudes, and assumptions that structure our responses to events. We articulate these when asked about our beliefs. Vance had the intermediate belief, “I don’t think I’ll ever have another girlfriend as good as Kelsey”
What are schemas/core beliefs?
deep-level cognitions concerning our most basic sense of ourselves and other people. Schemas cannot be articulated without reflection and effort because they seem self-evidently “the way things are.” After some time in therapy, Vance articulated a core belief that he was a mediocre person, so no wonderful girl would want to be with him.
According to the cognitive perspective, what causes mental health problems?
mental health problems are caused by maladaptive automatic thoughts, rules, attitudes, assumptions, and, at the deepest level, maladaptive schemas, which result in misinterpretations of events, irrational beliefs, and failures to see the world and the self in a realistic, adaptive fashion
What happens when core beliefs are unrealistic?
perceptions of ongoing events and situations will frequently be distorted, because information that does not fit a schema cannot be assimilated. The person’s perceptions are so dominated by the effects of her past experiences that she cannot see new events and situations for what they are.
What is the moderation principle?
implies that extreme forms of functioning are likely to be maladaptive, and there is evidence for this idea in findings that black-and-white thinking is associated with
maladjustment
What are the 2 steps of assessment in cognitive therapy?
First, a general, descriptive assessment of the child’s mental health problems and functioning must be done.
Then, clinicians can investigate the client’s thinking in search of cognitive factors playing a role in his disturbance.
What does the change process involve in cognitive therapy?
Primary strategy is to test the accuracy, validity, and utility of the client’s beliefs
What is the primary change agent of cognitive therapy?
modifying the cognitions underlying the client’s emotional and/or behavioral problems. Cognitive therapy focuses on the B segment of Ellis’s model and attempts to change the thoughts occurring in between events and emotional consequences.
Generally, what do cognitive therapists’ styles look like?
They focus on reason and evidence, but, rather than engaging in debate, they use the Socratic method, gather information, and think along with their clients. These therapists try to stimulate the client’s own thinking while steering him in adaptive directions, make tentative suggestions for new cognitions and ask clients to assess their usefulness, and propose behavioral experiments for the client to perform, with the results of these experiments furnishing the basis for new cognitions.
