APP UNIT 8 (26-48)

dissociative identity disorder

a rare dissociative disorder in which a person exhibits two or more distinct and alternating personalities. Formerly called multiple personality disorder.

anorexia nervosa

an eating disorder in which a person (usually an adolescent female) maintains a starvation diet despite being significantly (15 percent or more) underweight.

bulimia nervosa

an eating disorder in which a person alternates binge eating (usually of high-calorie foods) with purging (by vomiting or laxative use), excessive exercise, or fasting.

binge eating disorder

significant binge-eating episodes, followed by distress, disgust, or guilt, but without the compensatory purging or fasting that marks bulimia nervosa.

personality disorders

psychological disorders characterized by inflexible and enduring behavior patterns that impair social functioning.

antisocial personality disorder

a personality disorder in which a person (usually a man) exhibits a lack of conscience for wrongdoing, even toward friends and family members. May be aggressive and ruthless or a clever con artist.

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.

elective 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 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 person’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 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.

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

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 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.