Acceptance or change: Treating socially anxious college students with ACT or CBGT.

Abstract

Traditionally, cognitive-behavioral therapy has worked from the assumption that anxiety, depression and other forms of emotional discomfort are caused by maladaptive or irrational patterns of thinking. Cognitive-behavioral therapists have developed an information- processing model, whereby hypothesized cognitive structures, or schemas, are causally involved in the development of psychopathology. Early maladaptive schemas predispose clients to distort events in a characteristic fashion (Young, Beck, & Weinberger, 1993). Treatment is aimed at identifying and modifying maladaptive beliefs and the underlying schemas from which they arise. Numerous interventions have been developed to accomplish these goals and many of these treatment procedures have received strong empirical support (Chambless & Hollon, 1998).