Myers' AP Psychology - Unit 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 medical procedures that act directly on the patient's physiology.

Eclectic Approach

an approach to psychotherapy that, depending on the client's problems, 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, 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 a 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.

Active Listening

empathic listening in which the listener echoes, restates, and clarifies. A feature of Roger's 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

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 Therapies

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 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.

Rational-Emotive Behavior Therapy (REBT)

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

Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy (CBT)

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

Group Therapy

therapy conducted with groups rather than individuals, permitting therapeutic benefits from group interaction.

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.

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.

Psychopharmacology

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

Antipsychotic Drugs

drugs used to treat schizophrenia and other forms of severe thought disorder.

Antianxiety Drugs

drugs used to control anxiety and agitation.

Antidepressant Drugs

drugs used to treat depression, anxiety disorders, obsessive-compulsive disorders, and posttraumatic stress disorder. (example: selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors - SSRIs.)

Electroconvulsive Therapy (ECT)

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

Repetitive Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (rTMS)

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

Psychosurgery

surgery that removes or destroys brain tissue in an effort to change behavior.

Lobotomy

a now-rare 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.

Sigmund Freud

Austrian neurologist and psychotherapist; first to emphasize the significance of unconscious processes in normal and neurotic behavior; founder of psychoanalysis as both a theory of personality and a therapeutic practice

Carl Rogers

American psychologist and among the founders of the humanistic approach (or client-centered approach) to psychology; widely considered to be one of the founding fathers of psychotherapy

Mary Cover Jones

American development psychologist and pioneer of behavior therapy; known for her famous study with Peter and the rabbit, in which she used techniques that were later refined and developed into exposure therapies (exposure therapies are now the most widely used types of behavior therapies)

Joseph Wolpe

praised Mary Cover Jones as "the mother of behavior therapy," and refined her experimental techniques 30 years after her work to develop exposure therapies, which are now the most widely used types of behavior therapies

B.F. Skinner

leading American behaviorist psychologist; promoted the view that the proper aim of psychology should be to predict behavior and hence be able to control it; applied the results of his studies to the development of programmed learning and to educational practice

Albert Ellis

American psychologist who created rational-emotive behavior therapy (REBT); believed that many problems simply arise from irrational thinking, and can be overcome by therapy that approaches them rationally

Aaron Beck

American psychiatrist who is considered the founder of cognitive therapy; his pioneering theories are widely used in the treatment of clinical depression