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Both the nature of human problems and the process of behavioral change are increasingly being viewed from a cognitive-structural perspective. The concept of a cognitive schema seems to be the major theoretical construct used by researchers studying how cognitive structures influence human behavior. Schemas are fundamental cognitive structures, derived from past experience. Schemas operate by selectively organizing the on-going experience of each person into subjectively meaningful patterns. Through the operation of schemas, people are active constructors of their own psychological realities. This article presents an overview of the philosophical, historical, and theoretical foundations of schema theory. The relevance of schema theory for psychotherapy is presented through a discussion of schema oriented cognitive-behavioral theorists. A specific application of a schema framework in psychotherapy is illustrated by research on depressive self-schemas. It is hoped this article will serve as a stimulus to the continued application of schema oriented cognitive-structural approaches to research and practice in psychotherapy.
One result of the cognitive revolution in psychology is the proliferation of cognitive theories and constructs aimed at describing and explaining human behavior (Bransford, 1979; Neisser, 1976, 1980). The study of human behavior from a cognitive mediational perspective has come to dominate much of experimental (Neisser, 1976), developmental (Flavell, 1985), social (Markus & Zajonc, 1985), and therapeutic (Mahoney & Freeman, 1985) psychology. The multiple approaches and concepts characterizing contemporary cognitive psychology offer a rich, yet confusing source of ideas, information, and research methods for psychotherapists to draw from (Arnkoff, 1980; Landau & Goldfried, 1981; Safran & Greenberg, 1985). The purpose of this article is to discuss the application of one of the major perspectives in cognitive psychology, schema theory, to psychotherapy.
Two of the major approaches that have emerged from the cognitive mediational perspective are information-processing psychology and constructivist psychology (Arnkoff, 1980; Neisser, 1980; Weimer, 1977). Both of these approaches conform to the cognitive mediational perspective, which holds that people are active processors of information. Information-processing psychology is based on an analogy with computers that views people as complex processors of environmental information. In this approach, cognitive processes are broken down into interactive stages of information-processing activity (e.g., Anderson & Bower, 1973; Atkinson & Shiffrin, 1968; Craik & Lockhart, 1972; Newell & Simon, 1972). While information-processing psychology has been...