Cognitive Behavioral Perspective

Cognitive Behavioral Perspective on Anxieties and Phobias

Gilberto Henrique de Barros

January 26, 2015

PSYC3110 – Abnormal Psychology

Author Note. This paper was prepared for Abnormal Psychology taught by Professor Heidi King

Cognitive-Behavioral Perspective

According to Butcher, Hooley and Mineka (2014), the Cognitive-Behavioral Perspective attempts to incorporate the complexities of human cognition and their distortion to enable the causes of psychopathology be understood. This perspective relies on a key concept called ‘schema’, developed by people according to their temperament, skills and experiences and representing the knowledge that guides the current information processing and often leads to distortions in attention, memory and understanding.

Causes of Anxiety and Phobias under Cognitive Perspective

Beck and Emery (2005) developed their theoretical and empirical study on anxiety disorders and phobias under the cognitive perspective during the last 20 years. They based their study on the central features of new cognitive models of anxiety disorders, such as cognitive schema, in which people process biased information focusing attention on threat, and strong misinterpretation of ambiguous stimuli.  

Beck and Emery (2005) performed extensive empirical research to make biased information processing valid through description of how anxious people narrow their attention on threat ignoring safety cues. By using probe detection, they demonstrated through experiences that people with anxiety selectively attend to threatening semantic and to pictorial stimuli. Furthermore, they have also demonstrated that people unconsciously had attention biases and proposed that anxious people erroneously evaluated neutral situations as dangerous.

According to Beck and Emery (2005), many studies confirmed that this thesis demonstrate that ambiguous scenarios involving potential harm make people with anxiety more likely rate negative or catastrophic explanations for the events than do non-anxious people. Their theory also concluded that activating an abnormal cognitive set should bias the entire sequence of information processing from perception to retrieval from long-term memory.

Recent studies confirm Beck and Emery’s thesis that imagery is an important cognitive mechanism that maintains anxiety symptoms. Beck and Emery (2005) reported that patients with panic disorders experience frightening imagery that accompany their negative automatic thoughts during instances of acute anxiety.

Comparison between Cognitive and Socio-Cultural viewpoints

Viewpoint of Anxiety and Phobias similarly

Anxiety Researchers, through the application of Implicit Association Task (IAT), a reaction-time computer task that measures the strengths of association between concepts in memory, studied fear-related cognitive structures, or schemas, in individuals with specific phobias. They found that spider-fearful participants demonstrated the opposite pattern. In a follow-up study, they reported the attenuation of the implicit associations following psychotherapy, suggesting that the structures of anxiety-relevant schemas changed with successful psychosocial interventions. Thus, the IAT has the potential to yield data that defines the parameters and structure of maladaptive schemas associated with anxiety disorders.

According to Beck and Emery (2005), there is strong empirical evidence that anxious individuals exhibit attentional biases toward threat in their environment, so that they detect potential danger more quickly than non-anxious individuals detect and focus their attention on threat at the expense of neutral or safety stimuli. When socially anxious individuals are in a potentially embarrassing situation, they turn their attention onto themselves instead of monitoring their environment. This shift of attention impairs performance in some instances increases negative affect, and activate negative cognitions. This line of research raises the interesting notion that more than one type of attentional biases is at work in social phobia, each of which may be amendable to treatment with cognitive therapy.