Understanding Psychology (10th Ed)

 COGNITIVE PERSPECTIVE 
The medical, psychoanalytic, and behavioral perspectives view people’s behavior as 
the result of factors largely beyond their control. To many critics of these views, 
however, people’s thoughts cannot be ignored. 
In response to such concerns, some psychologists employ a  cognitive perspective  .
Rather than considering only external behavior, as in traditional behavioral approaches, 
psychoanalytic perspective
The perspective that suggests that 
abnormal behavior stems from child-
hood confl icts over opposing wishes 
regarding sex and aggression.
behavioral perspective 
The perspec-
tive that looks at the behavior itself as 
the problem.
cognitive perspective
The perspective 
that suggests that people’s thoughts 
and beliefs are a central component of 
abnormal behavior.
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 Module 
46 
Normal Versus Abnormal: Making the Distinction 
507
the cognitive approach assumes that cognitions (people’s thoughts and beliefs) are 
central to a person’s abnormal behavior. A primary goal of treatment using the cogni-
tive perspective is to explicitly teach new, more adaptive ways of thinking. 
For instance, suppose that you develop the erroneous belief that “doing well on 
this exam is crucial to my entire future” whenever you take an exam. Through ther-
apy, you might learn to hold the more realistic and less anxiety-producing thought, 
“my entire future is not dependent on this one exam.” By changing cognitions in this 
way, psychologists working within a cognitive framework help people free them-
selves from thoughts and behaviors that are potentially maladaptive (Clark, 2004; 
Everly & Lating, 2007). 
The cognitive perspective is not without critics. For example, it is possible that 
maladaptive cognitions are the symptoms or consequences of disorders rather than 
their cause. Furthermore, there are circumstances in which negative beliefs may not 
be irrational at all but simply refl ect the unpleasant environments in which people 
live—after all, there are times when a single exam may be extremely important. Still, 
cognitive theorists would argue that one can fi nd a more adaptive way of framing 
beliefs even in the most negative circumstances.