Jean Piaget, a Swiss psychologist, identified two manners in which people process information- assimilation and accommodation. Individuals will either conform, or assimilate, to an experience or they will change their mode of thinking by accepting new information or accommodating. This paragraph needs to be tied in to the idea of CBT.
Albert Ellis, a founder of CBT, is considered one of the most influential psychotherapists of the twentieth century by the American Psychological Association (Van Wormer, 2011). Ellis developed the Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy (REBT) model, a faction of CBT (Van Wormer, 2011). To begin the REBT process, an assessment is performed to identify the individual’s thought progression, as it was believed that the person’s behavior was a result of his or her thought patterns. Ellis illustrated the …show more content…
The same is true for thought patterns. Unhealthy patterns of thought will continue and be reinforced by behavior if not stopped or redirected by another force. CBT can be used to break such patterns of irrational thoughts. In the article “Crime Continuity and Psychological Inertia: Testing the Cognitive Mediation and Additive Postulates with Male Adjudicated Delinquents,” a study of juveniles aging from 14 to 18, from urban areas comprised of mostly African American and Hispanic males, was conducted and analyzed (Walters, 2015). In that article, Glenn Walters characterized psychological inertia by six cognitive variables; criminal thinking, positive outcome expectancies for crime, attribution biases, efficacy expectancies, goals, and values (2015). Walters theorizes these variables must be extensively researched as they encourage repeated offending behavior