Cognitive processes play a key role in maintaining many psychological disorders. Attention, memory and reasoning can work very differently in the context of a psychological disorder.
The importance of cognition in psychopathology is enormous. In this sense, the presence and evolution of different cognitive factors are the variables that reveal or persist certain psychological disorders.
- Are we talking about anxiety.
- Sadness.
- Guilt? Emotions? Or very inappropriate and therefore inappropriate behaviors Some people may recognize an anxiety attack.
- An attack of self-harm in depression or rituals performed by a person with obsessive-compulsive disorder (ONAC).
- But do not observe cognitive symptoms.
Despite this, processes such as attention, logical reasoning and memory become different in many types of psychological disorders, these processes are not the same in people with good psychological health as in those who have inappropriate behaviors that affect their daily lives, this does not mean that these processes will be observed in the same way each time.
People with ODO, generalized anxiety disorder (TAG) or post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), for example, have very poor early thinking, but that doesn’t mean they’ve always had it and will continue to have it.
Psychological processes that can be altered in different psychological disorders are: memory, logical reasoning, thinking, attention, perception and emotional regulation.
We’ll talk about some of them with illustrative examples of various disorders below. The goal will be to understand a little more the importance of cognitive factors in psychopathology.
Attention is a process that illustrates very well the importance of cognition in psychopathology, it is a psychological process that shows an inadequate pattern in people with psychological disorders.
This model is related to hypervigilance. People with psychological problems tend to pay more attention to the stimuli that correspond to 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 because of signs that something is not well received, but also because of their own bodily sensations (changes in the heart, breathing?) It’s also an exaggerated attention to yourself.
In the cognitive process of memory several phenomena occur depending on the disorder we analyze, some of them are:
While everyone has biases in logical reasoning, it is possible to observe the importance of cognition in psychopathology through some examples of more extreme biases, so the reasoning biases associated with various disorders, such as:
Cavilations, intrusions, and anxieties are elements that tend to be stronger or more intensified when associated with a psychological disorder. The importance of cognition in psychopathology is seen in disorders such as ODO, where intrusions and recurrent thoughts are reinforced. Symptoms don’t just appear more often, but they’re also more severe.
In people with depression, these thoughts include “I’m worthless”; anxious people think “will they stop loving me?”people with ODO think I’m going to get infected!?Generally, a person with a psychic problem will oversize their thoughts until they realize they are reality.
Suppression of thought is particularly problematic in some cases, such as ODO, when a person tries to use only the will to not think about something, get distracted or eliminate thought, what usually happens is the exact opposite.
Knowing the importance of cognition in psychopathology can make us realize how complicated these cognitive changes are if left untreated. When designing an intervention for a person with ODO, it is important to understand that:
Thus, if a depressed person has a clearly negative point of view, it will be very complicated that, in a routine where negative and positive events are intertwined, it will come out of its systematic error. Therefore, a specialist-led intervention is necessary.