CONTRIBUTIONS OF COGNITIVE THEORY TO NEW BEHAVIORAL TREATMENTS

Although clinical, social, and cognitive psychologists all use the con cept of ''cognition,'' they often use it in different ways to refer to different phenomena. We offer a heuristic framework for distinguishin g among three general uses of the word cognition, and apply this frame work to an evaluation of the experiential avoidance concept presented by Hayes and Gifford (this issue). While acknowledging the promise of such work, we raise concerns about its possible limitations. We recomm end that clinical applications of the cognition concept be grounded in the theories and methods of contemporary cognitive and neural science s. In support of our recommendation, we present three examples from ex periments from our own research.