one day there was a dog...
and the dog was trained thus:

tone - shock
tone - shock
tone - shock

after a while the dog came to respond like this

tone - fear

does the dog have the irrational belief 'tones are dangerous'?

let the dog repeat after me 100,000 times
'tones are not dangerous'

is that going to help extinguish the dogs emotional response?

lol.

EMOTIONAL RESPONSES NEED NOT ARISE IN RESPONSE TO THOUGHTS THEY CAN ARISE IN RESPONSE TO (RELATIVELY) UNINTERPRETED STIMULUS FEATURES

if you flash a picture to someone in (i think...) under 250 milliseconds then they are unable to report seeing the picture and they are unable to report what the picture is of.

if you flash a picture of a spider a snake and a mushroom to someone with a spider phobia then they will show heightened skin galvanisation response (SGR - a measure of emotional response) to the pic of the spider but not the snake or the mushroom.
if you flash a picture of a spider a snake and a mushroom to someone with a snake phobia then they will show a heightened SGR to the picture of the snake, but not the other two.
people without phobias show baseline SGR to all three

EMOTIONAL RESPONSES CAN ARISE IN RESPONSE TO UNCONSCIOUSLY PERCEIVED STIMULUS FEATURES

lets say i have a fear of spiders...

is my emotion irrational?
my emotion is supposed to be irrational because...
fear is a response to a perceived threat (by definition)
thus if i show a fear response to a spider then that must be because i believe
'that spider is a threat'
but if i believe 'that spider is a threat' then how come i say 'i do not believe that spider is a threat - i know that spider cannot hurt me'.

do i believe both (in which case i endorse a contradiction - hence the irrationality)?

what about when my fear occurs in response to a picture of a spider?

do i believe 'that picture of the spider can hurt me'?
do i believe 'pictures in general can hurt me'?

what sort of nonsense is this?

we have already seen that emotions can occur without beliefs (in the case of subliminally perceived stimuli)

lets suppose you tell the person with the spider phobia to repeat after me
'spiders cannot hurt me' 100,000 times...

is this likely to help the person any more than the dog?

EMOTIONS CAN BE ENCAPSULATED FROM COGNITION SO THAT SOME EMOTIONAL RESPONSES ARE NOT RESPONSES TO COGNITION AND CANNOT BE MODIFIED BY IT

of course...

sometimes emotions DO arise in response to cognition...
sometimes emotions CAN be modified by cognition...

but not all of them

and not all of the time

so...

i reckon the cognitive error in cognitive therapy is overgeneralisation.

they ain't perfect neither ;-)