Cognitive styles bear on the organization and control of attention, thought, feelings, and motives in cognitive processing. Highlighted here are two attentional cognitive styles of sharp-focus versus broad-focus scanning that apprehends incidental information. Defensive styles bear on the organization and control of intrusive affects in cognition; they represent consistent modes of accommodating anxiety and conflict so as to maintain reasonably adaptive cognitive functioning. Because the four major defensive styles associated with obsessive-compulsive, paranoid, hysterical, and impulsive neuroses are distinguished by differential modes of attentional scanning, the two attentional cognitive styles offer a heuristic means of organizing these defensive styles in behavioral expression.