unit 13

Eclectic approach:

an approach to psychotherapy that, depending on the client’s problems, uses techniques from various forms of therapy.

Psychotherapy:

treatment involving psychological techniques; consists of interactions between a trained therapist and someone seeking to overcome psychological difficulties or achieve personal growth.

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, 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 behaviors and events in order to promote insight.

Transference:

in psychoanalysis, the patient’s transfer to the analyst of emotions linked with other relationships (such as love or hatred for a parent).

psychodynamic therapy:

therapy deriving from the psychoanalytic tradition that views individuals as responding to unconscious forces and childhood experiences, and that seeks to enhance self-insight.

insight therapies:

a variety of therapies that aim to improve psychological functioning by increasing the client’s awareness of  underlying motives and defenses.

client centered therapy:

a humanistic therapy, developed by Carl Rogers, in which the therapist uses techniques such as active listening within a genuine, accepting, empathic environment to facilitate client’s growth. (Also called person-centered therapy.)

active listening:

empathic listening in which the listener echoes, restates, and clarifies.  A feature of Roger’s client-centered therapy.

unconditioned positive regard:

a caring, accepting, nonjudgmental attitude, which Carl Rogers believed would help clients to develop self-awareness and self-acceptance.

behavior therapy:

therapy that applies learning principles to the elimination of unwanted behaviors.

Counterconditioning:

a behavior therapy procedure that used classical conditioning to evoke new responses to stimuli that are triggering unwanted behaviors; includes exposure therapies and aversive conditioning.

exposure therapy:

behavioral techniques, such as systematic desensitization, that treat anxieties by exposing people (in imagination or actuality) to the things they fear and avoid.

systematic desensitization:

a type of exposure therapy that associates a pleasant relaxed state with gradually increasing anxiety-triggering stimuli.  Commonly used to treat phobias.

virtual reality exposure therapy:

an anxiety treatment that progressively exposes people to simulations of 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 behavior (such as drinking alcohol).

token economy:

an operant conditioning procedure in which people earn a token of some sort for exhibiting a desired behavior and can later exchange the tokens for various privileges or treats.

cognitive therapy:

therapy that teaches people new, more adaptive ways of thinking and acting; based on the assumption that thoughts intervene between events and our emotional reactions.

cognitive behavioral therapy:

a popular integrative therapy that combines cognitive therapy (changing self-defeating thinking) with behavior therapy (changing behavior).

family therapy:

therapy that treats the family as a system. Views an individual’s unwanted behaviors as influenced by, or directed at, other family members

regression toward the mean:

the tendency for extreme or unusual scores to fall back (regress) toward their average.

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.

biomedical therapy:

prescribed medications or medical procedures that act directly on the patient’s nervous system.