The field of psychological science is undergoing something of revolution in the way it sees the origin and maintenance of emotional problems. From this new seeing is emerging a new way of helping those people who come to therapists for help. This book contributes to this development. In the 1970s and 1980s the main concern of research in clinical psychology was to investigate biases in information processing. The field was dominated by experiments demonstrating, again and again, the extent to which people suffering from depression or from anxiety disorders of various kinds, sh- ed biases in the way they attended to their internal or external environment; biases in the way they remembered the past or anticipated the future; biases in their judgements and interpretations. Part of this approach was research on schemas. Schemas are information processing structures that normally assist in the streamlining of encoding and retrieval of complex sets of - formation. Such structures are enormously valuable in making cognitive processing efficient, but they can also make habitual the biases that are seen elsewhere in the information processing system, establishing them into a biased sense of ‘self’, ‘me’, and ‘how I am’. When such patterns of processing become automatic in this way, then these habitual reactions in thinking and feeling, and in interactions with the world, coalesce to form higher-order patterns: this we label ‘personality’.weiterlesen