CHAPTER 6
Changing Your Anxious 
Thoughts and Expectations
The word cognition  refers to the ways in which we process information, including experi -
ences such as thought, perception, interpretation, attention, memory, and knowledge. 
The word cognitive  is simply the adjectival form of the term cognition. For example, 
cognitive science is the science concerned with the ways in which we think. Cognitive 
therapy  is a type of psychotherapy that is designed to alter negative and unrealistic beliefs, 
thoughts, and interpretations.
This chapter provides an overview of strategies that have been shown to be useful for 
decreasing social anxiety by changing negative or unrealistic patterns of thinking. Many 
of the cognitive techniques and principles discussed in this book have been presented 
and expanded upon elsewhere by authors such as Aaron T. Beck (Beck, Emery, and 
Greenberg 1985), David Burns (1999), David M. Clark (Clark and Wells 1995), Richard 
Heimberg (Heimberg and Becker 2002), Christine Padesky (Greenberger and Padesky 
1995), and others. Over the years, strategies similar to those discussed in this chapter 
have been adopted by the majority of therapists who practice cognitive therapy.
THE ORIGINS OF COGNITIVE THERAPY
Cognitive therapy was proposed in the 1960s and 1970s as an alternative to traditional 
psychodynamic psychotherapies , which were the most prevalent forms of therapy at the time. 
The original (and most inﬂuential), form of psychodynamic psychotherapy is psychoanaly -
sis, which Sigmund Freud developed in the early 1900s. Psychodynamic psychotherapies,