During the past 30 years, experimental psychopathologists have conducted many studies aiming to elucidate the cognitive abnormalities that may figure in the etiology and maintenance of OCD. In this paper, we review research on both dysfunctional beliefs and cognitive deficits in OCD, as findings from both traditional self-report and information-processing approaches provide distinct sources of ...

Cancer patients often have to deal with numerous side effects and psychological distress during chemotherapy. Research highlights that dysfunctional metacognitive beliefs are the basis for the development and maintenance of emotional disorders. The present research is a first attempt to explore how metacognitions influence anxiety and depression in cancer patients undergoing chemotherapy. A sam...

Over the past decades, delusions have become the subject of growing and productive research spanning clinical and cognitive neurosciences. Despite this, the nature of belief, which underpins the construct of delusions, has received little formal investigation. No account of delusions, however, would be complete without a cognitive level analysis of belief per se. One reason for this neglect is ...

We introduce a model of strategic thinking in games of initial response. Unlike standard models of strategic thinking, in this framework the player’s ‘depth of reasoning’ is endogenously determined, and it can be disentangled from his beliefs over his opponent’s cognitive bound. In our approach, individuals act as if they follow a cost-benefit analysis. The depth of reasoning is a function of t...

Cognitive restructuring is a fundamental method within cognitive behavioural therapy of changing dysfunctional beliefs into flexible beliefs and learning to react appropriately to the reality of an anxiety-causing situation. To clarify the neural mechanisms of cognitive restructuring, we designed a unique task that replicated psychotherapy during a brain scan. The brain activities of healthy ma...

This study tests three hypotheses, predicting first that metacognition is highly correlated with anxiety and obsessive-compulsive (O-C) symptoms, second that it mediates the relationship between O-C symptoms and anxiety, and third that the meta-cognitive predictors of anxiety are different from the meta-cognitive predictors of O-C symptoms. The sample of the present study was 850 students selec...

Negative symptoms have clear functional implications in schizophrenia and are typically unresponsive to current treatments. The cognitive model of negative symptoms suggests that dysfunctional beliefs are influential in the development and maintenance of negative symptoms and schizophrenia. The current study reports on a preliminary investigation of a new measure of Negative Expectancy Appraisa...

This study tested the hypothesis that in the minds of adult religious adherents, acquired beliefs about the extraordinary characteristics of God coexist with, rather than replace, an initial representation of God formed by co-option of the evolved person concept. In three experiments, Christian religious adherents were asked to evaluate a series of statements for which core intuitions about per...

BACKGROUND Sleep disturbance is a commonly reported residual symptom after effective depression treatment. This residual sleep impairment, as well as the presence of problem levels of certain sleep beliefs, may be important for depressive relapse prevention, and as such should be addressed in treatment. The following study examined residual sleep disturbance and residual maladaptive sleep belie...