Cognitive Risks

This chapter focuses on how several prominent cognitive risk processes (attention bias, overgeneral autobiographical memory, executive functioning difficulties) and products (negative inferential style, dysfunctional attitudes, depressive rumination) may translate stress into different forms of prevalent psychopathologies, including internalizing (e.g., depression, anxiety) and externalizing disorders (e.g., conduct disorder). First, prominent conceptual models are presented that explain how cognitive risks relate to psychopathology and the interplay between stress and cognition in contributing to psychopathology. Second, the chapter describes how cognitive risks have typically been conceptualized and measured, and it reviews evidence on associations between each cognitive risk and different psychopathologies. Third, three conceptual models are presented that can be used to organize and understand the relations among stress, cognition, and psychopathology—(1) vulnerability-stress, (2) mechanism, and (3) transactional/bidirectional. Last, key future research directions are highlighted, including integrating cognitive risks across multiple units of analysis and establishing a taxonomy of cognitive risk.