A type of psychotherapy first developed by psychiatrist Aaron T. Beck in the 1960s. Beck came to the conclusion that the way in which his clients perceived, interpreted and attributed meaning to their experience - a process known scientifically as cognition - was a key to therapy. Beck showed that a person’s emotions and behavior result from their thought processes. He developed a list of “errors” in thinking that could cause or maintain problematic emotions and behaviors, including arbitrary inference, selective abstraction, over-generalization, magnification (of negatives) and minimization (of positives). Most of the advances in the field of psychology over the last 30 years have been in the domain of cognitive-behavioral therapy. Contemporary cognitive-behavioral therapy seeks to identify and change “distorted” or “unrealistic” ways of thinking, and thereby to change emotion and behavior.
Dr. Levy article series
