Cognitive-Behavioural Approaches and Its Theoretical Model | Psychology

In this article we will discuss about the cognitive-behavioural approaches and its theoretical model.

Cognitive-Behavioural Approaches:

1. Cognitive Psychology:

Contemporary cognitive psychology could also be claimed to have its origins in that strand of thinking which is traceable to the Rationalist philosophers of the 17th and 18th centuries, who saw the direct investigation of the human mind as a legitimate and important domain of inquiry.

Amongst the 18th- century Rationalists, the mind was thought to have inherent organising powers with which it constructed the perceived world. Such ideas are still present today in notions such as the ‘structures of thought’ identified by anthropologists like Claude Levi-Strauss, or concepts like ‘deep structure’ and generative grammar proposed by linguists such as Noam Chomsky.

2. Behaviorism:

Behaviorism, founded through the writings of American psychologist John B. Watson, represented an insistence on collecting data concerning behaviour itself, i.e. the ways an organism acted, which could be seen and verified by observers.

First in explaining behaviour Watson emphasised the importance, not of ideas such as instinct, but rather the effects of the environment. Behaviour, rather than being driven from within, was influenced mainly by events in the organism’s immediate surroundings. Second, and associated with this, Watson saw human behaviour almost entirely as a product of learning.

As a basic mechanism for understanding this process, Watson pointed to the work of the Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov, who had earlier discovered the phenomenon known as conditioning. Watson proposed that this mechanism could be used to explain even quite complex kinds of learning by humans.

However, a third key point made by Watson was the fundamental scientific principle that we should attempt to explain complex processes in terms of simpler, more easily studied ones.

It was for this reason that researchers turned to the study of ‘infra-human’ species, and carried out systematic work on how such animals learned, and how their behaviour could be changed by varying their environments or learning experiences. From these investigations, concepts such as stimulus, response, reinforcement, extinction, and so on were developed.

Theoretical Model of Cognitive-Behavioural Approaches:

1. Environmental Influences on Behaviour:

The starting-point of behaviour analysis is the finding that an environmental event or stimulus (S) elicits a response (R). In behaviourist terminology this is represented by the simple notation S-R. The form of classical conditioning discovered by Pavlov fits this paradigm. The response is dependent upon the stimulus event which preceded it.

In the form of learning discovered by Skinner, operant conditioning, responses (here called operants) are influenced more by what happens afterwards than by what happens before. Behaviour is under the control of its consequences (C). In the same notation, this sequence is therefore usually symbolised S-R-C.

The difficulty with both of these models is that an anticipated lawful link between stimuli, responses, and consequences (sometimes expressed as Antecedents, Behaviour, Consequences or A-B-C) simply fails to appear. Something crucial has been left out of the model, the organism itself.

Depending upon how internal processes such as attention, perception, and memory operate, and upon the meaning of stimuli within them, different organisms given the same stimulus may still not emit the same response. For the notation to make sense a fourth factor, the organism (O), must be added, yielding a model which can be summarized by the acronym S-O-R- C.

2. Stimulus Organism Response Consequences (S – O – R – C):

The S-O-R-C model is the basic foundation of social learning and of cognitive-behavioural theories. The cognitive mediating events represented by the symbol O add a totally new dimension to the behaviourist learning approach. This could be described as the first principle of cognitive- behavioural theory.

3. Inter-Relationships of Thoughts, Feelings and Behaviour:

The second principle is the assertion that an organism’s, or persons, activity has three modalities. These are respectively behaviour, emotion, and cognition. These are described by means of a number of sometimes overlapping terms.

Behaviour is usually taken to refer to the motor system, and bodily movement, but also includes verbal behaviour or speech. The words affect or affective are sometimes used to denote emotion, but some writers use them to apply to cognitive attributes of emotion, others to depict physiological or somatic expression of feeling (e.g. in arousal).

Whatever the precise coverage of the terms used, the key principle is that these three modalities are inseparable. An account of human functioning with one of them left out would be absurd. They are not only interlinked but interlocked.