From cognition to emotion

This chapter discusses the author’s emerging interest in emotional processing and theory of emotion. While recognizing the importance of the traditional cognitive and behavioural model, the author reflects on the criticisms often leveled against CBT by people who view the approach as ignoring the importance of emotion, socialization experience, attachment and other essential processes in human development. The chapter reviews the role of social cognitive processes, theory of mind and how people come to interpret, evaluate and respond to their emotions and the emotions of other people. The Emotional Schema model recognizes the importance of models of cognitive content (Beck), the metacognitive model (Wells), ACT (Hayes), mindfulness (Williams, Segal, Orsillo), DBT (Linehan), compassion-focused therapy (Gilbert), emotion-focused therapy (Greenberg) and attribution models (Weiner, Abramson, Alloy).