Understanding COGNITIVE PROCESSES in Therapy:
Expectations, Appraisals, Attributions
What kinds of mental events do cognitive therapists deal with? For the purposes of therapy, cognitive processes can be divided into short-term and long-term processes. The short-term processes are conscious. We are aware of them, or can become aware of them with practice. These include expectations, appraisals, and attributions. The long-term cognitive processes are not, generally speaking, available to consciousness. They are hypothetical constructs or dispositions that show themselves in the way they govern the short -term processes. One long-term process involves beliefs. We will discuss the short -term processes first.
Expectations:
Expectations are cognitions that explicitly anticipate future events. The speech giver who upon seeing a few people walk out then thought "this is going to be a failure" is reporting an expectation. He anticipates future consequences, in this case, bad ones.
In his seminal work, Albert Bandura analyzed the notion of expectation and helped to usher in the cognitive school of therapy. In his early work, Bandura showed that people learned not only by direct reinforcement but also by observing others being reinforced. He concluded that the behavioral principles of reinforcement were insufficient and that such "vicarious learning" must involve the learning of expectations. (Rotter)
Kinds of expectancies: an outcome expectation is a person's estimate that a given behavior will lead to a desired outcome, and an efficacy expectation is the belief that he can successfully execute the behavior that produces the desired outcome. Outcome and efficacy expectations are different because a person may be certain that a particular course of action will produce a given outcome, but he may doubt that he can perform this action.
For example, he may realize that touching a snake will reduce his snake phobia, but he may still be unable to touch the snake. Bandura believes that the success of systematic desensitization and modeling therapies in curing phobias is attributable to changes in self-efficacy expectations.
In both situations, the patient learns that he can make those responses-relaxation and approach-which will overcome the phobia. A "micro-analysis" of efficacy expectations and behavioral change in snake phonics has confirmed this speculation. Successful therapy creates high efficacy expectations for approaching a boa constrictor. The higher the level of efficacy expectations at the end of treatment, the better was the approach behavior to the snake (Bandura).
Appraisals
We are constantly appraising and evaluating both what happens to us and what we do about it. These appraisals and evaluations are sometimes very obvious to us, but at other times we are unaware of them. For cognitive therapists, such automatic thoughts often precede and cause emotion (Beck, 1976).
The speech giver becomes anxious and depressed once he thinks, "This is going to be a failure." He is not only expecting future consequences, he is also appraising his actions. He judges them to be failure s, and this appraisal causes his negative emotions. This appraisal process is automatic. After a lifetime of practice, it occurs habitually and rapidly. The individual in therapy must be trained to slow down his thought process to become aware of such thoughts. Automatic thoughts are not vague and ill-formed, rather they are specific and discrete sentences. In addition, while they may seem implausible to the objective observer, they seem highly reasonable to the person who has them.
Test-anxious individuals are often found to make self-defeating appraisals. A student, for example, taking an examination may say to himself, "Look at that other student. She just left the room. She's much smarter than I am. My going so slowly means I will surely fail." In therapy, this person is taught to reappraise the situation: in short, to test his original appraisal of the event. "She left the room early because she didn't bother to check her answers. Chances are I probably won't fail. And even if! do people probably won't think I'm stupid. And even if they do that doesn't mean I am stupid."
The goal of the therapist here is to get the client to catch hold of his self-defeating thoughts as they come about, criticize them, control them, and thereby avoid the occurrence of anxiety.
A major proponent of cognitive therapy, A. T. Beck (1976) argues that specific emotions are always preceded by discrete thoughts. Sadness is preceded by the thought "something of value has been lost." Anxiety is preceded by the thought "a threat of harm exists," and anger is preceded by the thought "my personal domain is being trespassed against." This is a sweeping and simple formulation of emotional life: the essence of sadness, anxiety, and anger consists of appraisals of loss, threat, and trespass, respectively.
Thus, for cognitive therapists, modifying those thoughts will alter the emotion.
Attributions
Another kind of short-term mental event that cognitive therapists try to modify is attribution. An attribution is an individual's conception of why an event has befallen him. When a student fails an examination, he asks himself,
"Why did I fail?"
Depending on the causal analysis he makes, different consequences ensue. The student might make an external or internal attribution (Rotter). He might believe that the examination was unfair, an external cause. Alternatively, he might believe that he is stupid, an internal cause. A second dimension along which attributions for failure are made is stable or unstable (Weiner). A stable cause is one that persists in time; an unstable cause is one that is transient. For example, the student might believe that he failed because he did not get a good night's sleep, an unstable cause (which is also internal). Alternatively, the student might believe that he has no mathematical ability, a stable cause (which is also internal). Finally, an attribution for failure can be global or specific (Abramson, Seligman). An attribution to global factors means that failure must occur on many different tasks, and an attribution to specific factors means that failure must occur only on this task. For example, the student who fails might believe that he failed because he is stupid, a global cause (which is also stable and internal). Or he might believe that he failed because the form number of the test was 13, an unlucky number. This latter is a specific attribution (which is also external and stable).
Cognitive therapists try to change an individual's attributions. For example, women with low self-esteem usually make intern al attributions when they fail. They believe that they have failed because they are stupid, incompetent, and unlovable. To deal with this attribution, each week, the therapist has them record five different bad events that have occurred during each week and then he has them write down external attributions for the events.
For example, one woman might write, "my boyfriend criticized my behavior at a party last night, not because I am socially unskilled, but rather because he was in a bad mood." The goal is to get the woman to shift from internal to external what she believes to be the causes of bad events. After a few weeks, clients begin to see that there are alternative causes for their failures, and the low self-esteem and depression brought about by the internal attributions begin to lift (Ickes and Leyden, 1979; Beck et al., 1979).
Expectations:
Expectations are cognitions that explicitly anticipate future events. The speech giver who upon seeing a few people walk out then thought "this is going to be a failure" is reporting an expectation. He anticipates future consequences, in this case, bad ones.
In his seminal work, Albert Bandura analyzed the notion of expectation and helped to usher in the cognitive school of therapy. In his early work, Bandura showed that people learned not only by direct reinforcement but also by observing others being reinforced. He concluded that the behavioral principles of reinforcement were insufficient and that such "vicarious learning" must involve the learning of expectations. (Rotter)
Kinds of expectancies: an outcome expectation is a person's estimate that a given behavior will lead to a desired outcome, and an efficacy expectation is the belief that he can successfully execute the behavior that produces the desired outcome. Outcome and efficacy expectations are different because a person may be certain that a particular course of action will produce a given outcome, but he may doubt that he can perform this action.
For example, he may realize that touching a snake will reduce his snake phobia, but he may still be unable to touch the snake. Bandura believes that the success of systematic desensitization and modeling therapies in curing phobias is attributable to changes in self-efficacy expectations.
In both situations, the patient learns that he can make those responses-relaxation and approach-which will overcome the phobia. A "micro-analysis" of efficacy expectations and behavioral change in snake phonics has confirmed this speculation. Successful therapy creates high efficacy expectations for approaching a boa constrictor. The higher the level of efficacy expectations at the end of treatment, the better was the approach behavior to the snake (Bandura).
Appraisals
We are constantly appraising and evaluating both what happens to us and what we do about it. These appraisals and evaluations are sometimes very obvious to us, but at other times we are unaware of them. For cognitive therapists, such automatic thoughts often precede and cause emotion (Beck, 1976).
The speech giver becomes anxious and depressed once he thinks, "This is going to be a failure." He is not only expecting future consequences, he is also appraising his actions. He judges them to be failure s, and this appraisal causes his negative emotions. This appraisal process is automatic. After a lifetime of practice, it occurs habitually and rapidly. The individual in therapy must be trained to slow down his thought process to become aware of such thoughts. Automatic thoughts are not vague and ill-formed, rather they are specific and discrete sentences. In addition, while they may seem implausible to the objective observer, they seem highly reasonable to the person who has them.
Test-anxious individuals are often found to make self-defeating appraisals. A student, for example, taking an examination may say to himself, "Look at that other student. She just left the room. She's much smarter than I am. My going so slowly means I will surely fail." In therapy, this person is taught to reappraise the situation: in short, to test his original appraisal of the event. "She left the room early because she didn't bother to check her answers. Chances are I probably won't fail. And even if! do people probably won't think I'm stupid. And even if they do that doesn't mean I am stupid."
The goal of the therapist here is to get the client to catch hold of his self-defeating thoughts as they come about, criticize them, control them, and thereby avoid the occurrence of anxiety.
A major proponent of cognitive therapy, A. T. Beck (1976) argues that specific emotions are always preceded by discrete thoughts. Sadness is preceded by the thought "something of value has been lost." Anxiety is preceded by the thought "a threat of harm exists," and anger is preceded by the thought "my personal domain is being trespassed against." This is a sweeping and simple formulation of emotional life: the essence of sadness, anxiety, and anger consists of appraisals of loss, threat, and trespass, respectively.
Thus, for cognitive therapists, modifying those thoughts will alter the emotion.
Attributions
Another kind of short-term mental event that cognitive therapists try to modify is attribution. An attribution is an individual's conception of why an event has befallen him. When a student fails an examination, he asks himself,
"Why did I fail?"
Depending on the causal analysis he makes, different consequences ensue. The student might make an external or internal attribution (Rotter). He might believe that the examination was unfair, an external cause. Alternatively, he might believe that he is stupid, an internal cause. A second dimension along which attributions for failure are made is stable or unstable (Weiner). A stable cause is one that persists in time; an unstable cause is one that is transient. For example, the student might believe that he failed because he did not get a good night's sleep, an unstable cause (which is also internal). Alternatively, the student might believe that he has no mathematical ability, a stable cause (which is also internal). Finally, an attribution for failure can be global or specific (Abramson, Seligman). An attribution to global factors means that failure must occur on many different tasks, and an attribution to specific factors means that failure must occur only on this task. For example, the student who fails might believe that he failed because he is stupid, a global cause (which is also stable and internal). Or he might believe that he failed because the form number of the test was 13, an unlucky number. This latter is a specific attribution (which is also external and stable).
Cognitive therapists try to change an individual's attributions. For example, women with low self-esteem usually make intern al attributions when they fail. They believe that they have failed because they are stupid, incompetent, and unlovable. To deal with this attribution, each week, the therapist has them record five different bad events that have occurred during each week and then he has them write down external attributions for the events.
For example, one woman might write, "my boyfriend criticized my behavior at a party last night, not because I am socially unskilled, but rather because he was in a bad mood." The goal is to get the woman to shift from internal to external what she believes to be the causes of bad events. After a few weeks, clients begin to see that there are alternative causes for their failures, and the low self-esteem and depression brought about by the internal attributions begin to lift (Ickes and Leyden, 1979; Beck et al., 1979).
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I encourage you to schedule a FREE CONSULTATION with the treatment method I recommend:
http://www.theliberatormethod.com/Welcome.html
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
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