3.13 Study Notes

Vocabulary flashcards covering key behavior therapy concepts, techniques, historical figures, and interventions based on the lecture notes.

Behavior Therapy

A form of psychotherapy that employs principles of learning, such as classical and operant conditioning, to help clients change undesirable behaviors.

Baseline

The present rate at which a target behavior occurs before treatment begins, used by therapists to evaluate whether an intervention is effective.

Counterconditioning

A behavioral treatment method where a client learns a new response to a stimulus that previously elicited an undesirable behavior.

Aversive Conditioning

A counterconditioning technique that pairs an unpleasant stimulus, such as a mild electric shock, bad taste, or repulsive odor, with an unwanted behavior to eliminate it.

Antabuse

A medication used in aversion therapy for alcoholism that triggers unpleasant physical effects when combined with alcohol, creating a conditioned aversion.

Exposure Therapy

A behavioral treatment method that presents clients with the fear-inducing object or situation in reality, imagination, or virtual reality to eliminate anxiety through extinction.

Mary Cover Jones

A psychologist considered the mother of behavior therapy who reported the first use of exposure therapy in 1924 by conditioning a boy named Peter to unlearn his fear of rabbits.

Systematic Desensitization

A popular form of exposure therapy refined by Joseph Wolpe wherein progressive relaxation is gradually paired with increasing levels of anxiety-inducing stimuli along a fear hierarchy.

Joseph Wolpe

The psychologist who in 1958 refined Mary Cover Jones' techniques to establish systematic desensitization.

Progressive Relaxation

A relaxation procedure where a person is taught to systematically relax each muscle group to achieve a calm state prior to encountering anxiety-provoking stimuli.

Virtual Reality Exposure Therapy

A form of exposure therapy that uses computer simulations to recreate anxiety-inducing environments to treat phobias, claustrophobia, aviophobia, and PTSD.

Virtual Iraq

A virtual reality simulation mimicking Middle Eastern environments used to treat PTSD in combat veterans, resulting in clinically significant symptom reduction in approximately 80\text{\null}\% of completing participants.

Applied Behavioral Analysis (ABA)

A complex form of operant behavioral therapy involving assessment and systematic planning to replace maladaptive behaviors with prosocial ones by reinforcing incompatible behaviors.

Negative Reinforcement

A consequence of an operant behavior that subtracts or reduces a negative or fearful stimulus, thereby increasing future avoidant behavior through feelings of escape or relief.

Token Economy

An operant conditioning intervention in a controlled setting where individuals are rewarded for positive behaviors with tokens that can be exchanged for items or privileges.