Cognitive Psychology is a branch of psychology that studies and focuses on internal mental processes, how everything works inside our brain, like how we think, memorize, and perceive the world, how we pay attention to particular things and ignore the rest, how we solve problems and how we understand and produce language. Learning about the overall functioning of our brain provides us with valuable insights that can assist us in understanding the human brain and developing new ways to provide appropriate support to people with psychological and cognitive issues.
Today, people worldwide widely practice this approach, devising ways to improve mental health, learning, productivity, and emotional well-being. It has now become an essential part of therapy and interventions by shifting our focus on how our thoughts can affect our emotions and behaviours.
Essential Thought Processes Studied In Cognitive Psychology
Cognitive psychology is vast and diverse. Cognitive psychologists study various topics related to thought processes, including the following:
- Attention: How we engage ourselves in selective attention, paying attention to one thing at a time while ignoring others (e.g., Me working on this article while ignoring everything else that is happening around me).
- Perception: How we understand, make sense of the world, and interpret the sensory information that we receive from our sensory organs (e.g., how we look at our friend’s face and recognize them or how we hear the clinking sound of bangles from afar and conclude that our mother is home).
- Memory: How we sustain and recall information. How we remember things for a lifetime whereas forgetting some within seconds (e.g., memorizing and then recalling answers before our examination or trying to retain the OTP number till we require it and they forget it entirely).
- Decision Making: How we choose between two or multiple things and try to make the right choice (e.g., deciding what to wear before going to college or deciding on which career path to take).
- Thinking and Reasoning: How we analyze information and make appropriate judgements (e.g., making a full-fledged itinerary before going on a trip and estimating the overall budget).
- Language: How we understand and communicate with others verbally, through writing and facial or body gestures.
- Problem-Solving: How we find solutions to complex problems and to everyday basic life struggles.
Read More: What goes on in our Minds when we Solve Problems?
Origin Of Cognitive Psychology
Cognitive Psychology emerged as a response to Behaviorism (another approach of psychology that primarily focused on observable behaviours) between the 1950s and 1960s. Behaviorism states that we learn only by interacting with the environment and overlook other aspects that can influence our behavior including our mental processes. The invention and advancement in the field of technology, particularly the development of computers inspired psychologists to look at the human brain as a computer- processing, storing, and retrieving information. In 1967, psychologist Ulric Neisser coined the term Cognitive Psychology and became known as the father of the field.
Read More: Critical Period in Brain development
Other Pioneers of Cognitive Psychology were
- Jean Piaget: He studied and proposed stages of cognitive development in children. Popularized the concept of Object Permanence (realizing that things still exist even if we cannot see them or are hidden from us), Ego-centrism (children struggle to see things from other’s perspectives), Conservation (the amount of something remains the same even if its shape gets changed) and Hypothetico-deductive Thinking (the ability to form hypotheses and test them logically).
- George A. Miller: He studied Short-Term Memory, also known as working memory and proposed the concept of “7 ± 2”, that the human mind can hold 7 items, plus or minus 2 at a time, and that our brain can temporarily store only a limited amount of information.
- Hermann Ebbinghaus: He conducted extensive research on memory and forgetting and developed the Forgetting Curve, which demonstrated how we lose access to information over time, which is stored in our brain if not repeated.
During this time, a great deal of research was conducted on mental processes and as a result, Cognitive Psychology became widely accepted and celebrated across the globe after the 1950s.
Read More: The Mini Theories of Psychology
Applications Of Cognitive Psychology In Mental Health Today
- Cognitive Rehabilitation: It helps individuals with brain injuries and cognitive impairments to regain their level of functioning.
- Improves Decision-Making and Problem-Solving Skills: It helps people to come up with better thinking strategies to make better and healthier life choices.
- Cognitive Behavioral Therapy(CBT: A popular therapy, which helps individuals to identify and work on their negative thought patterns to manage conditions like anxiety, stress, depression, etc.
- Treatment of Phobias and Obsessive-Compulsive Disorders: It uses exposure therapy and cognitive restructuring to eliminate irrational fears, obsessive thoughts, and repetitive behaviour patterns.
- Digital Tools: Many apps use the principles of cognitive psychology and design tools that track our mood, our sleep cycle and quality and other information about our well-being to promote self-care.
Read More: Cognitive Behavioural Therapy: Concepts, Types & Techniques
Applications Of Cognitive Psychology In Mental Health Disorders
- Anxiety Disorders: CBT helps people to challenge and eliminate their irrational fears.
- Depression: It helps individuals to identify their negative thought patterns and develop better coping strategies to elevate their mood.
- Addiction and Substance Use Disorders: It focuses on changing thought patterns that trigger the craving for harmful and addictive substances.
- Eating Disorders: It identifies what distorted thoughts an individual has regarding their body image and self-concept and aims to alter those negative beliefs to promote a healthy lifestyle and eating pattern.
- Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder: Techniques like EMDR (Eye-Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) and CPT (Cognitive Processing Therapy) help individuals to reprocess the traumatic incident and reduce its physical and psychological impact on them.
Read More: Eating Disorder: Causes, Types And Symptoms
Importance Of Cognitive Psychology In Our Everyday Life
- Teaches us how to think critically and make decisions mindfully.
- Helps us to identify and work on our negative thoughts and behaviours.
- Provides us insights on how to improve our memory and learning by using techniques like mnemonics, chunking, etc.
- Helps us to understand how language and thought processes impact our communication which further impacts our relationships.
- It helps us to work on our thought patterns for any given situation, which makes us more adaptable to change cope with situations and manage our productivity during tough times.
- Makes us aware of common cognitive biases like confirmation bias (focusing only on the information that matches our belief system), the Halo Effect (forming a positive impression of someone based on a single trait), Hindsight Bias (believing that you saw it coming even if you did not), etc
Read More: Understanding Our Mental Traps: How Biases Lead to Distorted Thinking
Challenges And Criticisms
- Not all mental health conditions are purely cognitive.
- Human behaviour is complex and cannot solely be based on cognition.
- Many studies are conducted in labs which makes people believe that they cannot apply to real-life situations.
- Lays too much focus on mental processes while ignoring other factors like emotions and sociocultural influences.
- Measuring thoughts is hard and thoughts are highly personal, thus, they cannot be generalized to an entire population.
- Cognitive methods work very well for many disorders but they cannot apply to all and may provide limited help for some disorders.
Conclusion
Though cognitive psychology has its limitations and challenges, it has been of immense help to understanding human thought and behaviour and has been successful in treating and coping with a lot of mental health issues. Our brain has its pros and cons, as poetically stated by John Milton, “We can make heaven out of hell and hell out of heaven.” This quote reflects how impactful our thoughts can be and how much power it holds to shape and change our experiences of reality. Thus, we must understand what lies within and how our cognitive mechanisms take place so that we can better understand ourselves and others and make the most of our cognitive resources.
