Mindfulness: Cognitive and Emotional Change

Beck [1] developed cognitive therapy which led to broad therapeutic innovations and successful applications in the field of psychotherapy [2-4]. Mostly, by virtue of its linear nature and lack of empirical support from cognitive science, this clinically-driven model faced some limitations in practice [5]. To overcome the shortcomings, Teasdale and Barnard [6] experimentally investigated the link between cognition and emotion and came up with a non-linear/multilayer model (a science-driven model). As they suggested, information are processed in cognitive system at two qualitatively distinct levels, namely propositional level and implicational level. The former is linked with specific meanings behind language constructs (or words); the latter is associated with generic meanings behind language constructs (or words). In Beckian approach, it is the specific meanings that result in emotion production, whilst in the non-linear/multilayer model of cognition, in order to elicit emotional response, the generic, holistic meanings should be processed at implicational level [7].