Cognitive psychology and anxiety

Cognitive psychology is the study of how the mind processes information. In other words, it involves information processing – that is, the notion that psychological processes can be described by the flow of information within the nervous system. Examples of cognitive processes include the ways that people select, interpret and remember information from their environment. These processes are influenced by the concerns or beliefs that a person holds, leading to a particular response. For example, a patient with spider phobia may believe that spiders are dangerous; they may scan their environment for spiders, detect a spider’s web, notice that they feel anxious and come to the conclusion that a spider is nearby and about to approach them. They may then make an attempt to remember the location of the spider web and respond by avoiding that location in future. The cognitive processes that maintain other anxiety disorders may be similar to this example, but differ in their content and the concerns to which they relate. Examples of core concerns are provided in Figure 1 (see Harvey et al., 2004). Cognitive therapy is thought to work by identifying and modifying the cognitive processes that maintain a particular anxiety disorder (see Salkovskis, 1996).