ABSTRACT
In a nutshell, metacognition refers to our knowledge and beliefs about our mental processes or, to put it more colloquially, thinking about thinking. Such thinking can be either specific, such as our awareness of current efforts to retrieve a memory, or general, such as beliefs about our own cognitive skills and abilities (e.g., “I have a good memory”) or our theory about how human cognition operates (e.g., “Memory is an accurate record of previous experiences”). The reason such thinking is called “meta” is because its focus is thought itself, whereas the majority of our thinking focuses on thoughts about the physical and social world. For example, a client’s thoughts about her family interactions are about the social world, whereas her awareness that she has a tendency to mistakenly interpret her family’s actions and comments as insults is metacognition. A strategy common to many psychotherapists is to increase our clients’ metacognition with respect to their issues (i.e., to increase their psychological awareness).
