The main champions being Albert Ellis(1955) REBT who identified irrational beliefs and this later led to development of CBT by Aaron Beck ( 1963). The birth of cognitive behavioural psychotherapy(CBT) approaches has often been described as the clinical equivalent of the COGNITIVE REVOLUTION which took place in the field of scientific psychology thanks to Chomsky (1959), Miller et al. (1960), Newell et al. (1958) and many others.
What exactly is cognitive revolution?
A second revolution in behaviour therapy occurred in late 1960’s. An empirical study of how cognitions affect emotions and behaviour began around this time. CBT was thought to be the clinical equivalent of thecognitive revolution. It became common sense to consider the role of conscious thinking as a mediator between stimuli and responses. This history of revolution of “cognitive therapy” was helped by two other developing“cognitive sciences”.
Firstly it was social psychology and the“attribution theory” which was the exploration of our minds tendency to think about or “attribute” causes of actions to others. The second boost to the cognitive revolution was the development of computer science and programming. It was the perfect analogy for understanding “programming rules”for human brains and behaviour. Behaviour Therapists could further understand a patient’s difficulties by assessing the role of conscious thoughts and not just visible behaviours.
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The cognitive revolution was an intellectual movement that began in the 1950s as an interdisciplinary study of the mind and its processes.
1930 (Tolman & Honzik) – Learning contingent on meaningful and purposeful outcomes rather than immediate reinforcements.
1948 (Claude Shannon – Information Theory) – Information theory is the scientific study of the quantification, storage, and communication of digital information.
1950 – Alan Turing (formalization of algorithms and computations)
1956 – George Miller (Magical Number 7 plus or minus 2) – It is often interpreted to argue that the number of objects an average human can hold in short-term memory is 7 ± 2. This has occasionally been referred to as Miller’s law.
1957 – Noam Chomsky (Syntactic Structures) – The revolution consisted of the addition of a cognitive mediator interposed between environmental triggers and behavioural responses. This cognitive mediator would be organized in terms of self-schemata, which play a structural role: self-schemata would provide guidance, consistency, coordination, and integration to mental states (Neisser, 1967; Markus, 1977).
Sometimes, this revolution that led to CBT approaches is also called the “second wave,” since the cognitive mediator would have been absent in the “first wave” behavioural model (Hayes, 2004). Ellis’ Rational Emotive Behaviour Therapy (REBT; Ellis, 1955, 1962; Ellis and Grieger, 1986) and Beck’s Cognitive Therapy (CT; Beck, 1963, 1964, 1976; Beck et al., 1979) were the champions of the “second wave,” being the first to propose clinical counterparts to the cognitive revolution (Giovanni M. Ruggiero et al., 2018). This combination of scientific disciplines and theories gave us the first true “Cognitive Behaviour Therapy.”
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