Aaron T. Freud's Magnitive Approach

INTRODUCTION
In the 1970’s, a number of behaviour therapists, who were known to focus purely on observable behaviour, began to reappraise the importance of one’s thoughts, perceptions, evaluations and self statements. They began to view these “private events” as processes that mediate the responses of objective stimulus condition and, therefore, assist in determining behaviour and emotions (Borkovec, 1985; Mahoney & Arnkoff, 1978).
For cognitive theorists, human beings have the capacity to be rational or irrational, erroneous or realistic, in their thinking. They subscribe to the view that what people think about their experiences determines how they will feel about them, and ultimately what they do. Therefore, they consider erroneous thinking

Beck developed an approach called cognitive therapy (CT) based on his research on depression (Beck 1963, 1967). He was interested in studying people’s automatic thoughts, which are personalised notions that are triggered by particular stimuli that lead to emotional responses. He concluded based on his observations of depressed clients that they had a negative bias in the way they viewed certain life events resulting in major cognitive distortions. He contended that people with emotional difficulties tended it make some characteristic “logical errors” that distorted their objective reality. Some of the systematic errors that he identified

• Personalization involves viewing external events as related to themselves, even when there is no basis for making that conclusion.
• Labelling and mislabelling involves defining one’s identity based on one’s imperfections and mistakes made in the past.
Cognitive Therapy (CT), therefore, views psychological problems as arising due to faulty thinking, making incorrect inferences based on inadequate or incorrect information and a failure to distinguish between fantasy and reality. According to Weishaar (1993), the theoretical assumptions of cognitive therapy are that (i) human being’s internal thoughts are accessible to introspection, (ii) client’s beliefs have highly personal meanings, and (iii) These meanings can be discovered by the client himself (as cited in Corey, 2013).

RESEARCH STUDIES ON COGNITIVE