Cognitive-Affective Bases of Behavior
What to know
Integrate cognition and emotion rather than treating them separately. Core cognitive constructs: attention (selective, divided, sustained), working memory (limited capacity, active maintenance), long-term memory subtypes (episodic, semantic, procedural), encoding specificity, and retrieval cues. Cognitive biases that drive clinical judgment: confirmation bias, availability heuristic, anchoring, base-rate neglect. Affective constructs: appraisal theory (emotion arises from interpretation of events), emotional regulation strategies (reappraisal vs. suppression), and the influence of mood on memory and judgment (mood-congruent recall). Understand cognitive-behavioral links: automatic thoughts, schemas, and attentional bias toward threat in anxiety.
Traps
Questions conflate working memory with short-term storage or mislabel suppression as an adaptive strategy. Watch for items describing a clinician's diagnostic reasoning error-identify the specific heuristic, not just "bias." Distinguish mood-congruent memory (matching current mood) from mood-dependent memory (state-dependent retrieval).
Rule of thumb
When a stem describes a clinician or client jumping to a conclusion, name the mechanism: availability (vivid examples), confirmation (seeking supporting evidence), anchoring (first impression dominates). For emotion items, ask whether the strategy changes the situation appraisal (reappraisal, generally adaptive) or only the expressive response (suppression, often costly).