Ninchi rinshō shinri-gaku (Development of Cognitive Clinical Psychology - Evidence-based Approach for Certified Public Psychologists)

What is Cognitive Clinical Psychology?
 
This book introduces the forefront of research in Japanese cognitive clinical psychology. Cognitive clinical psychology is an interdisciplinary field that integrates cognitive psychology and clinical psychology. The former, cognitive psychology, is a basic field that investigates the human mind from the perspective of cognition such as perception, memory, thought, and judgment. The latter, clinical psychology, is a practical field that provides psychological support to individuals with mental problems. Cognitive clinical psychology, by integrating these two fields together, seeks to understand mental disorders from the viewpoint of cognition, and applies this understanding to psychotherapy, thereby contributing to the promotion of mental health.
 
Cognitive clinical psychology has three research domains: Cognitive psychopathology, cognitive assessment, and cognitive behavioral therapy.
 
1) Cognitive Psychopathology
Problems of the mind, such as anxiety and depression, are emotional in nature, but it has become clear that cognition greatly influences them. For example, in the states of anxiety, ‘attention’ may become excessively focused on objects of fear, making them uncontrollable. People prone to depression often show cognitive distortions to interpret everything negatively. In general, mental disorders are characterized by cognitive biases such as attentional biases, cognitive distortions, and memory biases.
 
Five clinical problems are addressed in this book: Anxiety and stress-related disorders; repetitive thinking; depression-related issues; hallucinations, delusions, and schizophrenia, and personality and related disorders. For each problem, how these are understood from a cognitive perspective and how they can be treated is examined based on the latest empirical research.
 
2) Cognitive Assessment
Various techniques have been developed to measure cognitive biases, including cognitive tasks, questionnaires, and interviews. This book introduces methods such as sleep assessment, measurement of mind-wandering, scales of self-reflection and insight, assessment of auditory hallucinations, personality disorder assessment, and scales of perfectionism.
 
3) Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT)
If cognitive biases exacerbate mental disorders, reducing these biases can alleviate these symptoms. This is the essence of cognitive therapy. Cognitive therapy merged with behavioral therapy, which had developed earlier, and came to be known as cognitive behavioral therapies (CBT). CBT has been proven by scientific evidence to be highly effective within a short period, and it is now considered the global standard for psychological treatment. Many chapters in this book present CBT, alongside other important techniques such as metacognitive therapy, mindfulness, metacognitive training, and anger control.
 
Cognitive Clinical Psychology and Licensed Psychologists
 
In 2017, the Certified Public Psychologist Act was enacted in Japan, establishing a national qualification for psychology professionals—a groundbreaking milestone in Japanese psychology. This book emphasizes that cognitive clinical psychology plays an essential role in the work of certified public psychologists. In graduate programs training certified public psychologists, mastery of cognitive behavioral therapy (psychotherapy based on behavioral and cognitive theories) is a required component. In this way, cognitive clinical psychology is a field of great social significance, and this book aspires to serve as a bridge to the next generation of research in cognitive clinical psychology.

 

(Written by TANNO Yoshihiko, Professor Emeritus, Graduate School of Arts and Sciences / 2025)