AP Psych Ch. 13

Psychotherapy

A treatment involving psychological techniques; consists of interactions between a trained therapist and someone seeking to overcome psychological difficulties or achieve personal growth.

Biomedical therapy

A treatment that involves prescribing medications or medical procedures to address psychological disorders.

Eclectic approach

A therapy style that combines techniques from various forms of therapy depending on the client’s problems.

Psychoanalysis

Freud’s therapeutic technique that aims to release repressed feelings by exploring unconscious motivations through methods like free association, dreams, and transference.

Resistance

In psychoanalysis, the blocking of anxiety-laden material from consciousness.

Interpretation

The analyst’s noting of supposed dream meanings, resistances, and other significant behaviors to promote insight.

Transference

The patient’s transfer of emotions linked with other relationships (e.g., love or hatred for a parent) onto the therapist.

Psychodynamic therapy

A therapy deriving from the psychoanalytic tradition; focuses on unconscious forces and childhood experiences but is more brief and face-to-face than Freud's model.

Insight therapies

A variety of therapies aiming to improve psychological functioning by increasing the client’s awareness of underlying motives and defenses.

Client-centered therapy

A humanistic therapy by Carl Rogers; uses active listening within a genuine, accepting, empathetic environment to facilitate client growth.

Active listening

Echoing, restating, and clarifying what the client expresses; a key technique in client-centered therapy.

Unconditional positive regard

A caring, nonjudgmental attitude that Rogers believed would help clients 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 uses classical conditioning to evoke new responses to stimuli that are triggering unwanted behaviors.

Exposure therapies

Behavioral techniques that treat anxieties by exposing people 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.

Virtual reality exposure therapy

A counterconditioning technique that treats anxiety by using electronic simulations to expose people to their fears.

Aversive conditioning

A type of counterconditioning that associates an unpleasant state with an unwanted behavior.

Token economy

An operant conditioning procedure in which people earn a token for exhibiting a desired behavior, which can be exchanged for rewards.

Cognitive therapy

Therapy that teaches people new, more adaptive ways of thinking; based on the idea that our thoughts influence our emotional reactions.

Rational-emotive behavior therapy (REBT)

A confrontational cognitive therapy developed by Albert Ellis that challenges irrational beliefs and attitudes.

Cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT)

A popular integrative therapy that combines cognitive (changing thinking) and behavioral (changing actions) techniques.

Group therapy

Therapy conducted with groups rather than individuals, providing benefits from group interaction.

Family therapy

Therapy that treats the family as a system, viewing 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 or behaviors to return to average levels.

Meta-analysis

A statistical procedure for 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/preferences.

Therapeutic alliance

A bond of trust and mutual understanding between therapist and client, seen as crucial for successful therapy.

Resilience

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

Psychopharmacology

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

Antipsychotic drugs

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

Antianxiety drugs

Drugs used to control anxiety and agitation.

Antidepressant drugs

Medications used to treat depression, anxiety disorders, OCD, and PTSD; often SSRIs.

Electroconvulsive therapy (ECT)

A biomedical therapy for severely depressed patients involving an electric current through the brain.

Repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS)

A newer treatment involving 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 by cutting the nerves connecting the frontal lobes to the emotion centers of the inner brain.