Overview Of Clinical Cognitive Psychology Essay Research

Overview Of Clinical Cognitive Psychology Essay, Research Paper

Title: Overview of Clinical Cognitive PsychologySubject: Cognitive PsychologyType: Research PaperAcademic Level: CollegeContent: Overview of clinical cognitive psychology Description: Write a description of clinical approach emphasizing theoretical underpinnings. Any activity requiring thought involves cognition. Relatively recently there has arisen a school of thought within psychology in general and (however strange it might at first seem) behaviorism in particular called cognitive psychology. It seems strange that this subdiscipline would identify itself with a method that ignored or denied the existence of internal thought processes. A perhaps overly simple definition of cognition is information processing . A better definition for our purposes is: a special purpose device whose special purpose is adaptation to the environment (Medin and Ross, 1992) . In much the same way as animals are models of their environments, our cognition is a schema of our experience. Buddhism teaches that there are aggregates of consciousness e.g. being conscious of the sounds of the rain–consciousness arising from hearing. If our life is the creation of our mind (Mascaro 35) , and we can alter how we think and feel about different things!, we can effectively change everything about our individual experience; even if the circumstances of our life are beyond our control. There is no objective reality…you say tomato, I say tomaaato… The jist of this paper will be to examine some of the theoretical underpinnings of clinical cognitive psychology, especially in its relation to what shall be called negative affect –specifically anxiety, panic disorder and its companion, depression. Although there is an increasing body of evidence for a genetically transmitted neurochemical abnormality that is episodically manifested in sudden surges of autonimoc arousal and fear (as well as depression and more generalized anxiety) (McNally, 1990) , for the sake of this paper, the role of environmental factors will be stressed as the cause and enduring cognitive substructures the maintenance of anxiety disorders. So how does panic disorder from phobic anxiety, or is there really such a clear distinction. The nature of panic attacks, where the person is suddenly and very unexpectedly gripped by terror accompanied by feelings of imminent death or sudden insanity, often accompanied by tachycardia and shortness of breath is commonly differentiated from phobic anxiety by the very suddenness of its occurrence and the apparent lack of antecedent. In the case of phobic anxiety, the cause of the anxiety is generally known: fear of final exams for instance. In an attempt to differentiate between panic and more generalized anxiety it should be pointed out that panic attacks were previously thought of as being the manifestations of intense generalized anxiety disorder (Barlow, 1988). There is now a clearer distinction: that panic can be defined more clearly as involving feelings of physical harm, whereas anxiety tends to involve the fear of being hurt in another way–usually being rejected o!r humiliated. Something which further complicates things is the fear of experiencing another period of intense anxiety. This could take on a life of its own apart from the cause that started with the original experience (this idea is central to the work of A.T. Beck and its implications in depression will be reviewed later). The nature of panic is that it is usually not precipitated by anything specific. There is an interesting theory which demands more attention: that panic is really the Catastrophic misinterpretation of bodily sensations (McNally, 1990) . This could mean interpreting tachycardia as an impending heart attack. It is important to note that a panic attack usually occurs after the detection and possible subsequent misinterpretation of such a sensation. This misinterpretation also need not be conscious: in patients who experience recurrent attacks, catastrophic misinterpretations may be so fast and automatic that patients may not be aware of the interpretive process (Clark, 1988). This contrasts with the view that emotion results from the conscious labeling of unexplained physiological arousal (Schacter and Singer, 1962) . The explanations of these sensations as something other than impending doom does little to dispel their unsettling effects. To know intellectually !that what you are experiencing is not a heart attack or that you have suddenly gone insane does not make the sensation any less real. This would seem to lend credence to psychological theories of panic attacks which postulate that the condition is caused by factors that are not strictly biochemical. A common theme in the cognition of panickers is the anticipated loss of control immediately before onset of a panic attack. This indicates a strong psychological component, although this is not to say that anticipatory cognition does not arise from a sudden biochemical change. This does however point to a strong psychological component in the etiology and maintenance of panic disorder. It has been shown that such cognitive-therapeutic measures as applied relaxation, breathing control and systematic exposure to feared bodily sensations can alleviate panic attacks (Barlow, Craske, Cerny & Klosko, 1989; Beck, 1988; Ost, 1988; Salkovkis, Jones & Clark 1986). A persistent cultural (and philosophical) dualism that is