Cognitive theories are characterized by their focus on the idea that how and what people think leads to the arousal of emotions and that certain thoughts and beliefs lead to disturbed emotions and behaviors and others lead to healthy emotions and adaptive behavior. In this chapter, we review cognitive theories (CTs): their definition, historical evolution, theory of personality and psychopathology, clinical assessment, and treatment process, including the psychotherapy relationship. The chapter concludes with the research evidence for, major accomplishments of, and future directions for CTs, especially in clinical psychology.
DEFINITIONCTs of psychotherapy, commonly known as cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT), focus on changing the content and the process of what and how people think that arouses emotions and maladaptive behaviors to reduce psychopathology and promote human growth. A person's present conscious thoughts, images, perceptions, schema, predictions, and appraisals mediate or arouse emotions and behaviors. CTs focus on directly changing these cognitions to change corresponding emotions and behavior. CTs are informational rather than motivational. They focus on how people extract and process information from their environment to create a scheme of the world that encourages coping and survival. Cognitive content and process can be learned, but regardless of how people originally learned their dysfunctional beliefs, CTs focus on the cognitive structures and behaviors that maintain the disturbance.Despite the popularity of CBTs, they do not represent a monolithic paradigm. There are at least a dozen schools or variants of CBT. Some examples include cognitive therapy (A. T. Beck & Haigh, 2014), cognitive-behavioral modifications (Meichenbaum, 1977), epistemological therapies (Kelly, 1955), attributional therapies (Seligman, 1991), meta-cognitive therapy (Wells, 2008), problemsolving therapy (PST; Nezu, Nezu, & D'Zurilla, 2013), rational emotive behavior therapy (REBT; Ellis, 1962), and schema-focused therapy (Young, Klosko, & Weishaar, 2003). Although these models have more similarities than differences, they hypothesize different cognitions as mediating the relationship between environmental stressors and disturbance and focus on different psychotherapy techniques.
HISTORICAL EVOLUTIONThe notion that thinking leads to emotions and emotional disturbance has a long history in Western civilization in both philosophy and literature. The Stoic philosopher Epictetus (55-135 AD) noted that "people are not disturbed by things, but by the view they take of them" (Epictetus, 1996). The Roman philosopher-emperor Marcus Aurelius (121-180 AD) wrote, "Very little is needed to make a happy life; it is all within yourself, in your way of thinking" (Rutherford, 1989, p. 168). Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592), an influential French Renaissance thinker and the father of modern skepticism,
