More than 30 years ago, Aaron T. Beck (1967, 1976) emphasized the operation of cognitive schemas as the most fundamental factor in his theories of emotional disorders. Schemas, accordingly, played a principal role in the development and maintenance of psychological disorders as well as in the recurrence and relapse of episodes. Despite the central place of cognitive schemas in the earliest writings of cognitive therapy, the cognitive techniques and therapeutic approaches that later emerged tended to address cognition at the level of automatic negative thoughts, intermediate beliefs, and attributional style
