This book responds to the explosion of interest in using the methods of experimental cognitive psychology to help understand emotional disorders, especially common anxiety and depressive disorders.
An explosion of interest in the application of cognitive psychology to the understanding of emotional disorders has prompted a second edition of this highly regarded book. Reviewing the work of the last decade, it looks at how emotion affects the following processes, and how they in turn contribute to emotional disorder: conscious and nonconscious processing; memory bias and memory deficits; attentional bias; schematic processing; judgements; and thoughts and images. The second edition provides in particular:
- An exploration of abnormalities in cognitive processing
- Reviews of key papers that use experimental cognitive psychology to understand emotional disorders
- Descriptions of the authors? own research in this area
- A theoretical model to explain the phenomena described
The book has been written for postgraduate and advanced undergraduate psychologists interested in cognitive models in abnormal psychology, for clinical psychologists using cognitive therapies, and for cognitive psychologists wishing to explore the interface between cognition and emotion. "Drs Williams, Watts, MacLeod, and Mathews are world leaders in experimental psychopathology ? the authors synthesize these studies and those of other scholars, and show how the data can be accommodated by a revised version of their justly famous information-processing model of anxiety and depression. This book is essential reading for anyone wishing to become conversant with cutting-edge theory and research on the cognitive aspects of anxiety and mood disorders. The first edition of Cognitive Psychology and Emotional Disorders was a masterpiece, and the second edition is even better than the first." Richard J. McNally, Professor, Department of Psychology, Harvard University
