ABSTRACT
This chapter suggest that 'cognitive' events are real, but they simply mean behaviours involving language, which means that analysing the external contexts for language and thinking are once again of vital importance to understanding mental health. A form of behaviour related to language and which also arises only in social contexts, is the use of symbols. In all the fields of mental health both talking and thinking are very important behaviours —indeed pivotal—to consider and rethink. The chapter explains two 'systems' of cognitive processing, namely System 1 and System 2 of Kahneman and automatic and reflective systems of Thaler and Sunstein. The original cognitive model was to treat people as if they were scientists who took in and processed information around them to make decisions and to make attributions of cause. Attribution theory began in cognitive social psychology to explain how people assigned causes and responsibility to what they saw.
