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Cognitive therapy

Cognitive therapy - also called cognitive behavioral therapy - has proven to be a highly effective method of treatment for a number of different mental disabilities. Cognitive therapy incorporates one of the core models of psychology - classical conditioning and learning - with the more recently developed concept of cognitive distortion to help individuals change the way in which they interpret the world around them. This paper examines the model of cognitive therapy, looking in particular at the function of interpretation in the process of cognitive therapy.

Cognitive therapy is based on the idea that individuals can learn new ways of interpreting the world around them as well as interpreting their new concepts of themselves. Our perceptions of the world are relatively set; however, our understanding of the events in the work is far more flexible. We can manipulate - or relearn, depending upon how we choose to look at the process - our interpretations of the world. Cognitive therapy helps people to shift their understanding of the world and so helps to shift their behaviors as well as their self-identity. Given that distorted self-identity is a key element of so many forms of psycho-pathology, the ability of any form of therapy to shift self-identity can be extremely effective.

We should perhaps here define the concept of cognition. According to Clark and Fairburn (1997), cognition is the collection of processes that are involved in acquiring and processing knowledge. This includes all of the processes from perception to analysis to judgment and memorization. Cognition, Clark and Fairburn argue (and their definition is a generally accepted one) covers all of those mental processed that are understood to be a part of the experience of knowing, and they distinguish these cognitive mental processes from those mental processes that are linked either to emotion or feeling or (alternatively) to will and volition (Bergin and Garfield 1...

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Cognitive therapy. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 16:52, March 28, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1688148.html