does anyone knows how addiction happens according to the cognitive model in psychology?

Question

could someone answer me who knows psychology

actually what i mean is whether there is percptual addiction. Gestalt the german reserchers found that people like to see things in an ordered way. They experienced this with a display of dotes. they found that people tended to like the displays where dotes were in a more ordered way. My question is there any type perceptual addiction when you observer a thing which is not ordered or incomplete and tend to be addicted to perfect it.

Here are several examples. A person tends to see himself as someone who tries to be intelligence. This leads him to complete certain amount of qualifications, just enough to make himself be perceived intelligent. say people wouldnt consider themselves as intelligent if they dropped uni just before finishing it, but they would if they finished it a month later. Same addiction of completion or order could be described by people who try to collect stamps, coins etc.. until you reach the satisfying amount. Does anyone know such type of addiction?

Answer 1

They attribute it to what they call "thinking errors" and to the reinforcement of those "errors" by behaviours. Correspondingly, their way to create change is to practise new (more appropriate) thinking patterns.

As for your "display of dotes" - do you mean dots? - scientists see evidence that a bias for orderly, balance-shaped designs in preference to chaotic ones is built into the workings of human minds. The human body is balanced e.g. two eyes, nostrils, legs etc evenly placed relative to the centre line (spine). There is probably an evolutionary positive relationship between those two facts. This bias is in most of us a nature-led preference, not an addiction -- though you may have a point in that it might be expressed in addictive bahviours by some autistic people... I don't know if that's been investigated.

Most collectors of things do it for fun and without a sense of needing to reach a perfect number.... but any behaviour CAN be manifested addictively (including Y!A :-) ).

See www.cognitivetherapy.com and
www.cognitivebehaviourtherapy.org

Answer 2

Excellent question, hopefully I can provide a sufficient response. First let me establish my creditability, I am currently a Junior at Southern Illinois University pursuing a bachelor’s in psychology. Cognition is simply the mental processes that attribute to physiology and external behavior. From Pavlov’s perspective all actions are conditioned. Addiction can be considered a form of classical conditioning , in which an addiction elicits a positive response therefore it is continued to achieve the previously gained satisfaction. For example if a person is “addicted to cigarettes” they have been conditioned by the effects of nicotine. I may be able to provide a more plausible explanation if the addiction is specified.