Psych 111 Class 21 - Psychotherapy

Psychotherapy

psychological intervention designed to

• help people resolve emotional, behavior, and interpersonal problems

• improve quality of peoples lives

Insight therapy

• psychoanalytic/psychodynamic

• humanistic

Goal: expand awareness or insight

behavioral and cognitive behavioral approaches

• exposure therapies

  • systematic desensitization

• cognitive-behavioral therapies

• dialectical behavioral therapy

Goal: address current variables that maintain problematic thoughts, feelings, and behaviors

Psychoanalytic/psychodynamic therapies

Adverse childhood experiences, analysis, insight

Primary processes

• free association

• interpretation

• dream analysis

• working through stress

Evaluation

• insight

• repressed traumatic memories

Humanistic therapies

Person-centered therapy

• nondirective

Evaluation

• therapeutic relationship

• effectiveness

Systematic desensitization

• relaxation techniques

• relax and imagine first scene

• move to next when able to imagine the prior scene without anxiety

• continues until able to confront most fear-inducing scenes without anxiety

Exposure therapy

• flooding: immediate and intense exposure to a feared situation or object, rather than a gradual process or desensitization

  • response prevention

Three core assumptions of cognitive-behavioral therapies

1. Cognitions are identifiable and measurable

2. Cognitions are key in both heathy and unhealthy psychological functioning

3. irrational beliefs or thinking can be replaced with more rational and adaptive cognitions

Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy

Albert Ellis

• Activating event

• Beliefs

  • rational or irrational

• Consequences

Treatment

• d: dispute irrational beliefs

• e: adopt effective and rational beliefs

• f: experience new and desired feelings

Thinking Traps

Unhelpful, negative thought patterns

inaccurate and distorted thinking

impacting emotions and behavior

DBT

Dialectical Behavioral Therapy

• mindfulness

• distress tolerance

• emotional regulation

• interpersonal effectiveness

a type of therapy that helps people manage intense emotions, improve relationships, and reduce behaviors that can harm their quality of life

Evaluation of Cognitive-Behavioral Therapies

• more effective than no treatment or placebo

• at least as effective as (an in some cases more effective than) psychodynamic and person-centered therapies

• equally as effective as behavior treatments

Is psychotherapy effective?

80% of treated people have better outcomes than the average untreated person