Master Clinician Seminar 1 - Cognitive Behavior Therapy for Decision Making
Friday, November 17, 2023
8:30 AM – 10:30 AM PST
Location: Queets (505), Level 5
Earn 2 Credit
Keywords: Cognitive Schemas / Beliefs, Transdiagnostic, Cognitive Processes Level of Familiarity: Basic to Moderate Recommended Readings: Leahy, R. L. If Only.. Finding Freedom from Regret (2022). New York: Guilford, Leahy, R.L. (2015). Emotional Schema Therapy. New York: Guilford., Kahneman, D. (2011) Thinking Fast and Slow. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Anderson, C. J. (2003). The psychology of doing nothing: forms of decision avoidance result from reason and emotion. Psychological bulletin, 129(1), 139., Bjälkebring, P., Västfjäll, D., Svenson, O., & Slovic, P. (2016). Regulation of experienced and anticipated regret in daily decision making. Emotion, 16(3), 381.
Director American Institute for Cognitive Therapy New York City, New York
Most areas of psychopathology involve problems in decision making including avoidance, passivity, impulsiveness, procrastination, excessive reassurance seeking, and substance abuse. Although cognitive and social psychology have elaborated problematic processes in decision making very little of this has been applied to CBT. Effective therapy often involves helping clients evaluate their decisions and pursue alternatives that they otherwise might avoid. In this presentation we will review the following problems in decision making: loss aversion (framing decisions as losses only), arbitrary false dichotomies ("It's either A or B") , the endowment effect (placing greater value on the status quo), risk assessment (miscalculating probabilities and magnitudes of outcomes), myopic (short-term) focus, intolerance of uncertainty (demanding certainty and equating uncertainty with bad outcomes), faulty heuristics (e. g. , basing decisions on emotions, salience, recency, or accessibility), and making decisions focused primarily on avoiding regret. A wide range of techniques will be reviewed, including clarification of priorities, enhancing future self-perspective, examining opportunity costs, framing choice as risk vs. risk, developing pre-commitment strategies, reversing sunk-cost effects, and reducing the impact of regret and post-decision rumination. Some decision makers have idealized beliefs about decisions, rejecting ambivalence as an inevitable part of the tradeoffs underlying decision making under uncertainty. Specific decision styles are more likely to contribute to regret, including maximization, emotional perfectionism, intolerance of uncertainty, and over-valuation of "more" information rather than relevant information. In this presentation we will examine how decisions are linked to hindsight bias, maximization rather than satisfaction strategies, intolerance of uncertainty, rejection of ambivalence, refusal to accept tradeoffs, excessive information demands and ruminative processes. Participants are invited to consider decisions in their own lives in light of the material in this presentation.
Outline I. Normative and Descriptive Models of Decision-Making a. Ideal vs Real decisions b. Coping with limitations (Bounded Rationality) II. Common biases and heuristics a. Short-term vs. long-term; hedonistic biases; loss aversion; availability b. Playing to win vs. playing not to lose c. Maximizing vs. satisfying d. Intolerance of uncertainty and ambivalence III. Anticipatory and retrospective regret a. Exaggerating or underestimating risk b. Over-prediction of regret IV. The use of Multiple Selves a. Which self? b. Wisdom of the future self V. Depressive decision making a. Pessimistic bias b. Perception of future losses c. Inability to recover from loss VI. Building Resilience a. Acceptance of tradeoffs b. Life portfolio c. Writing the chapters in your book d. Using regret productively
Learning Objectives:
At the end of the session, the learner will be able to:
Identify problematic styles of decision making.
Identify opportunity costs, hindsight bias, risk vs. risk.
Identify strategies to help clients set realistic goals and accept tradeoffs.
Identify strategies to reduce rumination and indecision.
Identify maximization styles and how to reverse them.