Cognitive psychology for psychiatry — structured clinical viva

Opening definitions

Cognitive psychology studies attention, memory, executive control, judgment, and social cognition. Working memory is multi-component (central executive + phonological loop + visuospatial sketchpad + episodic buffer), not a single short-term store.[2] Executive functions show unity and diversity: updating, shifting, inhibition.[5] Attention networks: alerting, orienting, executive.[4]

Capacity teaching point (30 seconds)

Miller: ~7±2 chunks. Cowan: pure focus nearer ~4 when chunking supports limited. Clinical pearl: one instruction at a time, written plans, teach-back.[2]

Depression case

Multi-step failure = WM/executive load + possible rumination competing for central executive. “I always fail” = overgeneral autobiographical memory, not mere laziness.[11] Beck layers: automatic thoughts, intermediate beliefs, core schemas, triad self/world/future.[8] Intervention: collaborative restructuring + behavioural experiments + specificity cueing + compensatory simplification.

Panic case

Clark: catastrophic misinterpretation of bodily sensations + safety behaviours that block disconfirmation.[9] Rate expectancies; design tests that violate predicted catastrophe while fading pulse-checking/sitting. Link to ACT: anxiety taxes processing efficiency under load.[10]

Schizophrenia case

Positive symptoms remitted but function poor → cognitive and social-cognitive deficits drive disability (Green functional consequences; emotion processing, ToM, attribution, social perception).[12][14] Plan screening, remediation/compensation, supported employment, social cognition work — not only antipsychotic titration.

Heuristics and clinician traps

Representativeness, availability, anchoring — patients and clinicians.[6] Example: anchoring on first diagnosis; availability of recent suicide case inflating risk estimates without base rates.

Exam traps

• Equating IQ with all cognition
• Ignoring social cognition
• Calling WM “short-term memory only”
• Safety behaviours as “coping skills” without noting blocked learning
• Attributing all non-adherence to personality when capacity limits are exceeded Close by restating that cognition is a core recovery domain in psychosis and a mechanism language for CBT across disorders.[8][12][14]