At this juncture, before presenting any further detail, I believe that it may be useful to summarize the basic principles of the metacognitive approach:
1. It is proposed that the emotions of anxiety and sadness are basic internal signals of a discrepancy in self- regulation and of threats to well-being.
2. Such emotions are normally of limited duration because the person engages coping strategies to reduce threat and control cognition.
3. Psychological disorder results from the maintenance of emotional responses.
 4. They are maintained because of the individual’s thinking style and strategies.
5. The unhelpful style, found in all disorders, is called the CAS, con-sisting of worry/rumination, threat monitoring, unhelpful thought control strategies, and other forms of behavior (e.g., avoidance) that prevent adaptive learning.
6. The CAS is the result of erroneous metacognitive beliefs (knowl-edge) controlling and interpreting thinking and feeling states.
7. The CAS prolongs and intensifies negative emotional experience through several clearly specified mechanisms/pathways.