Toward an integrative model for CBT: Encompassing behavior, cognition, affect, and process

Abstract

Dramatic changes in our science in recent years have profound implications for how psychologists conceptualize, assess, and treat people. I comment on these developments and the contributions to this special series, focusing on how they speak to new directions and challenges for the future of CBT. Discoveries about mind, brain, and behavior that have vitalized psychological science in the last few decades are providing insights into such directly CBT-relevant processes as memory and the construction of personal narratives, attention control, and executive functions, including planning and conflict-monitoring, emotion and self-regulation, meta-cognition, and unconscious, automatic processing, as well as the nature, organization, and expressions of important individual differences. As the understanding of the subsystems and part-processes that collectively constitute the person's cognitive and emotional architecture escalates, it is an opportune moment to consider the implications for clinical psychology and the behavior therapies, especially CBT. I do so, drawing on work at the vanguard of the science and pointing to some of the implications for therapies committed to growing as the cognitive and behavioral sciences on which they are based evolve.