AP PSYCHOLOGY UNIT 8: Clinical Psychology Set lll

Insight therapies

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

Client-centered therapies

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 clients’ growth. (Also called person-centered therapy.)

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 to develop self-awareness and self-acceptance.

Behavior therapy

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

Counterconditioning

Behavior therapy procedures that use classical conditioning to evoke new responses to stimuli that are triggering unwanted behaviors; include exposure therapies and aversive conditioning.

Exposure therapy

Behavioral techniques, such as systematic desensitization and virtual reality exposure therapy, that treat anxieties by exposing people (in imagination or actual situations) 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 electronic stimulations 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; based on the assumption that thoughts intervene between events and our emotional reactions.

REBT

A confrontational cognitive therapy, developed by Albert Ellis, that vigorously challenges people’s illogical, self-defeating attitudes and assumptions.

CBT

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

Therapeutic alliance

A bond of trust and mutual understanding between a therapist and client, who work together constructively to overcome the client’s problem.

Resilience

The personal strength that helps most people cope with stress and recover from adversity and even trauma.

ECT

A biomedical therapy for severely depressed patients in which a brief electric current is sent through the brain of an anesthetized patient.

rTMS

The application of repeated pulses of magnetic energy to the brain; used to stimulate or suppress brain activity.

Psychopharmacology

The study of the effects of drugs on mind and behavior.

Lobotomy

A psychosurgical procedure once used to calm uncontrollably emotional or violent patients. The procedure cut the nerves connecting the frontal lobes to the emotion-controlling centers of the inner brain.