The importance of cognition in psychopathology

The importance of cognition in psychopathology

Cognitive processes play a fundamental role in the maintenance of many psychological disorders. In fact, processes, such as attention, memory or reasoning, can function in a significantly different way in the context of a psychological condition.

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The importance of cognition in psychopathology is enormous. In this sense, the presence and evolution of different cognitive factors is the variable that causes some psychological affections to appear or remain.

We talk about anxiety, sadness, guilt (emotions) or very misconduct and, therefore, maladaptive behaviors. Some would recognize an anxiety attack, a self-injurious crisis in depression or the rituals performed by a person with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD).

However, processes such as attention, reasoning or memory are different in different types of psychological disorders. These processes are not the same in adjusted people than in those with maladaptive behaviors that are affecting their day today. This does not mean that these processes will always be presented in the same way.

For example, that people with OCD, generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) or posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) have very mismatched anticipations does not mean that they have always had them or that they will have them forever.

Cognitive factors in psychopathology

The psychological processes that can be modified in different psychological disorders are memory, reasoning, thinking, attention, perception or emotional regulation.

Some of them are presented with illustrative examples concerning very diverse disorders. The objective will be to understand a little better the importance of cognitive factors in psychopathology.

Attention: excessive or defective

Attention is a process that illustrates very well the importance of cognition in psychopathology. It is a psychological process that shows a maladaptive pattern in people with psychological disorders.

This pattern is related to hypervigilance. People with psychological conditions tend to pay more attention to those stimuli congruent with their fears and concerns.

In social phobia, for example, there is selective attention to negative information and personal functioning. People with social phobia not only have hypervigilance in the signals that may indicate that they are not being well received, but also in their own bodily sensations (cardiac change, breathing ...). This is self-care.

Memory games

In the cognitive process of memory, numerous phenomena take place depending on the disorder to which we refer. Some of them are:

Selective memory: people with panic disorder, OCD, PTSD, GAD, mood disorders or eating disorders tend to remember the information congruent with their own fears, validating them. Thus, a person with a depressive disorder can remember the information that corroborates that his family does not understand or support him, eliminating those memories that say the opposite.

Overgeneralized memory: Autobiographical memory can be used to remember specific or overgeneralize. In some mood disorders, ACT or PTSD can be vaguely and diffusely remembered and then distort the memory.

Recurring memory: in some PTSD or panic disorders, the memorial process is full of intrusive and unwanted memories, which deal with the traumatic situation.

Confidence in memory: in others, such as OCD, trust is lost in a memory that works well, which leads the person to make compulsions. An example of this would be not knowing if the gas has been turned off, or if the door has been locked.

The biases of reasoning

Although all people have biases in our reasoning, the importance of cognition in psychopathology can be observed through much more extreme biases. In this way, we can find reasoning biases associated with various disorders, such as:

Interpretation bias of ambiguous stimuli: in disorders such as GAD or mood, there is usually a tendency to interpret ambiguous stimuli as negative. These stimuli can be gestures, changes in facial expression ...

Negative attributional style: this reasoning bias is typical in depressive disorders. The negative attributional style causes negative events that take place come from internal causes that are stable and will not change. In psychotic disorders, a positive attributional style usually appears; The fault of the bad is of the other.

Probability judgments: in certain disorders, there is a tendency to overestimate the probability of something bad happening and its terrible consequences. It appears, as mentioned before, in phobias, OCD, GAD, PTSD, psychotic or depressive disorders.

The traps of thought

Ruminations, intrusions, and concerns are elements that are usually pronounced or intensified associated with a psychological disorder. The importance of cognition in psychopathology is observed in disorders such as OCD, where intrusions and recurrent thoughts are enhanced. Not only that but in addition to appearing more, its intensity or power is greater.

In people with depression, it is "I am worthless", in people with anxiety it is "they will stop loving me", in people with OCD, "I will contaminate myself". As a rule, people with a psychological condition oversize these thoughts until they are taken for reality.

Thought suppression, for example, is especially problematic in people with OCD. When one tries to use only the will not to think about certain things, be distracted or eliminate thoughts, what they usually get is the opposite effect.

Conclusions: the difficulty of change

Knowing the importance of cognition in psychopathology can make us realize how complicated the change is if those elements are not worked. When designing an intervention with a person with OCD it is important to understand that:

There are cognitive factors behind that may be keeping the problem

That these cognitive ballasts can be an obstacle for other measures of this intervention plan to succeed.

Thus, if a person with depression has a negative attributional style, it will be very complicated that, in a routine in which negative and positive events are interspersed, he leaves his systematic error. Hence the intervention directed by a specialist is necessary.