A plea for more attention to mental representations

Abstract

In this invited essay I plead for a renewed attention to mental representations in research into psychopathology and its treatment. With the cognitive revolution in the second half of the previous century most psychological models of psychopathology were based on people's capacity to form mental representations of the world. However, much research effort was put into investigating cognitive biases instead of investigating mental representations, and attention shifted towards such biases, including claims that they are causal in psychopathology. Similar claims were made about emotion regulation difficulties. Moreover, in many treatment models that were developed the focus was more on cognitive biases and emotion regulation, than on underlying representations. In this essay I argue that the causal status of cognitive biases, emotion regulation, and similar phenomena is overestimated, and that in clinical reality such phenomena can be best conceptualized as output of activated mental representations. Moreover, I argue that the disappointing effectiveness and protection to relapse of many current psychological treatments are related to not addressing the underlying mental representation. Next I discuss aspects of mental representations that are important for understanding and treating psychopathology, after which I discuss the clinical implications. I sketch how better understanding the specificities of mental representations can help us to improve psychological treatments, and I make some suggestions for future research.

Keywords: Cognitive bias; Cognitive-behavior therapy; Conditioning theory; Imagery rescripting; Mental representation; Schema.