ch.13

• psychotherapy - treatment involving psychological techniques; consists of interactions between a trained therapist and someone seeking to overcome psychological difficulties or achieve personal growth
• biomedical therapy - prescribed medications or procedures that act directly on the person's physiology; uses drugs and brain stimulation
• eclectic approach - an approach to psychotherapy that uses techniques from various forms of therapy
• psychoanalysis - Sigmund Freud's therapeutic technique; Freud believed the patient's free associations, resistances, dreams, and transferences - and the therapist's interpretations of them - released previously repressed feelings of anxiety and abnormal behaviour, allowing the patient to gain self-insight
• resistance - in psychoanalysis, the blocking from consciousness of anxiety-laden material
• interpretation - in psychoanalysis, the analyst's noting supposed dream meanings, resistances, and other significant behaviours and events in order to promote insight
• transference - in psychoanalysis, the patient's transfer to the therapist of emotions linked with other relationships
• psychodynamic therapy - therapy deriving from the psychoanalytic tradition; views individuals as responding to unconscious forces and childhood experiences, and seeks to enhance self-insight
• insight therapies - therapies that aim to improve psychological functioning by increasing a person's awareness of underlying motives and defenses
• client - centered therapy - a humanistic therapy, developed by Rogers, in which the therapist uses techniques such as active listening and unconditional positive regard within an accepting, genuine, empathic environment to facilitate clients' growth
• active listening - empathic listening in which the listener echoes, restates, and clarifies; a feature of Rogers' client-centered therapy
• unconditional positive regard - a caring, accepting, nonjudgmental attitude, which Carl Rogers believed would help clients develop self-awareness and self-acceptance
• behaviour therapy - therapy that applies learning principles to the elimination of unwanted behaviours
• counterconditioning - behaviour therapy procedures that use classical conditioning to evoke new responses to stimuli that are triggering unwanted behaviours; goal is to undo a learned behaviourinclude exposure therapies and aversive conditioning
• Mary Cover Jones - considered "the mother of behaviour therapy; conducted the Peter study which involved counterconditioning
• exposure therapy - behavioural techniques, such as systematic desensitization and virtual reality exposure therapy, that treat anxieties by exposing people (in imaginary or actual situations) to the things they fear and avoid
• Joseph Wolpe - developed systematic desensitization and refined Jones' counterconditioning techniques into exposure therapies used today
• systematic desensitization - a type of exposure therapy that associates a pleasant relaxed state with gradually increasing anxiety-triggering stimuli; commonly used to treat phobias
• progressive relaxation - an individual learns to release tension in one muscle group after another, until you achieve a comfortable, complete relaxation
• virtual reality exposure therapy - a counterconditioning technique that treats anxiety through creative electronic simulations in which people can safely face their greatest fears, such as airplane flying, spiders, or public speaking
• aversive conditioning - a type of counterconditioning that associates an unpleasant state (such as nausea) with an unwanted behaviour (such as drinking alcohol)
• token economy - an operant conditioning procedure in which people earn a token for exhibiting a desired behaviour and can later exchange tokens for privileges or treats
• cognitive therapy - therapy that teaches people new, more adaptive ways of thinking; based on the assumption that faulty thoughts, such as negative self-talk and irrational beliefs, intervene between events and our emotional reactions
• Albert Ellis - developed Rational Emotive Behavioural Therapy (REBT); he described how therapy might challenge one client's illogical, self-defeating assumptions
• rational - emotive behaviour therapy (REBT) - a confrontational cognitive therapy, developed by Albert Ellis, that vigorously challenges people's illogical, self-defeating attitudes and assumptions
• the ABC's of REBT

  • Activating event - identify the event that affected your mental process or behaviour
  • Belief systems - identify the irrational beliefs and negative self-talk
  • Consequence - irrational beliefs lead to self-defeating behaviours, anxiety disorders, and depression; during this final step, the therapist vigorously disputes the client's faulty logic and self-defeating beliefs
• Aaron Beck - developed the Beck Depression Inventory and Cognitive Triad therapy; believes that depression-prone people are particularly susceptible to focusing selectively on negative events while ignoring positive events; in addition, depression-prone people typically engage in all-or-nothing thinking by believing that everything is either totally good or totally bad
• cognitive - behavioural therapy (CBT) - a popular integrative therapy that combines cognitive therapy (changing self-defeating thinking) with behaviour therapy (changing behaviour)
• dialectical behaviour therapy (DBT) - new variation of CBT; helps change harmful and suicidal behaviour patterns; attempts to make peace between two opposing forces: acceptance and change
• group therapy - therapy conducted with groups rather than individuals, providing benefits from group interaction
• family therapy - therapy that treats people in the context of their family system; views an individual's unwanted behaviours as influenced by, or directed at, other family members
• meta - analysis - a procedure for statistically combining the results of many different research studies
• evidence based practice - clinical decision making that integrates the best available research with clinical expertise and patient characteristics and preferences
• therapeutic alliance - a bond of trust and mutual understanding between a therapist and client, who work together constructively to overcome the client's problem
• psychopharmacology - the study of the effects of drugs on mental processes and behaviour
• antipsychotic drugs - drugs used to treat schizophrenia and other forms of severe thought disorder; work by decreasing activity at the dopamine receptors in the brain; Haldol and Thorazine are the best known antipsychotic drugs; atypical antipsychotic drugs, such as Clozaril, work to reduce the negative symptoms of schizophrenia
• tardive dyskinesia - a movement disorder characterized by involuntary movement of the tongue, facial muscles, and limbs; produced by long-term use of antipsychotic drugs
• antianxiety drugs - drugs used to control anxiety and agitation and produce relaxation by lowering sympathetic activity in the brain; Valium and Xanax are the best known antianxiety drugs
• antidepressant drugs - drugs used to treat depression, anxiety disorders, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and posttraumatic stress disorder; Prozac is the best known and most widely used SSRI (selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor)
• mood stabilizing drugs - designed to treat the combination of manic episodes and depression characteristic of bipolar disorder; lithium is the best known drug for treating bipolar disorders