Abstract
In spite of the widespread belief of cognitive behavior therapists and researchers that irrational thinking underlies much human psychological suffering, there is little if any direct evidence bearing on the assumption that people think in particular ways when confronted with stressful situations. A paradigm is proposed that appears capable of providing information about people's articulated thoughts as they occur in highly structured, experimenter-controlled situations. The results from an initial experiment indicate the utility of the paradigm in collecting data on how people think under both stressful and neutral conditions. The paradigm seems to offer great flexibility in examining thought processes under a wide range of conditions of interest to psychopathologists and cognitive researchers.
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This research was supported by NIMH grant MH 24237 and NSF grant BNS-7813054. Frank Durso served as one of the raters in the content analysis of the data, and helpful suggestions came from Donna Andrews and Marvin R. Goldfried.
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Davison, G.C., Robins, C. & Johnson, M.K. Articulated thoughts during simulated situations: A paradigm for studying cognition in emotion and behavior. Cogn Ther Res 7, 17–39 (1983). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01173421
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01173421