Cognitive Psychology and Emotional Disorders

Cognitive Psychology and Emotional Disorders, (2nd ed.) By J. M. G. Williams, F. N. Watts, C. Macleod & A. Mathews. Chichester: Wiley. 1997. Pp. xii+404. ISBN 0 471 94430 0. 19.99.

In 1988 Mark Williams and his colleagues published the now classic text in the area, their first edition of Cognitive Psychology and Emotional Disorders. In the time since this first edition, the area of cognition and emotion has moved on substantially, considerable credit for which must go to the present authors. However, one might wonder, is it not safer to leave classics to stand in their original form rather than update them? Would Stonehenge benefit from being turned into a skyscraper, or War and Peace benefit from the latest research on the Napoleonic Wars? At the core of this classic was the framework proposed by the authors for examining biases in cognitive processes in anxiety and depression; the authors' framework has generated extensive debate and empirical testing. The conclusion therefore is that this particular classic does benefit from its second edition.

The key problem that bedevilled the leading theories in this area in the 1980s was that global cognitive biases seemed to be predicted in the emotional disorders. Both Beck's schema theory and Bower's network theory seemed to predict cognitive biases across a range of attentional, mnemonic and judgmental tasks if carried out when the person was depressed or anxious. It became clear, however, that these global biases were not characteristic of the main emotional disorders, but, instead, that different biases were observed with different tasks requiring different cognitive processes in different mood states. The present edition provides an extensive, though not exhaustive, update on the relevant research that has been carried out in the past two decades and in the process the authors also present a refinement of their own framework. Of course, there is nothing worse than to give away the ending in a good whodunnit, but let us say that memory, for example, is not a monolithic structure to be influenced in an all-or-nothing fashion by mood state. Instead, memory consists of an interaction between automatic implicit processes and strategic explicit processes occurring in a range of modules and modalities. Current research suggests that depression influences strategic processes, whereas anxiety is more likely to influence implicit or automatic processes. The authors' amended framework should therefore provide another decade's worth of debate and testing and we can look forward, no doubt, to a third edition in the next millennium.

So are there any weaknesses in the present volume, or is it simply pusillanimous to even raise such a possibility? Well, my own biases lead me to look for more theory in the third edition. Those of us who hunger for a good theory or two are deprived until the final half of the final chapter before being offered some tantalizing information on recent multi-level theories (specifically, Barnard & Teasdale's Interacting Cognitive Subsystems, and Johnson's Multiple-Entry Memory Systems). The implications of multi-level theories for work on the emotional disorders are an unexplored gold mine, so perhaps we should be thankful that at least the authors have left something for the rest of us! These comments in no way distract, however, from this well-written and significant contribution to the area of cognition and emotion that should be read by all involved.