AP Psychology Notes: Insight, Biomedical, Behavior, and Cognitive Therapies

Insight & Biomedical Therapies

Psychodynamic & Humanistic Therapies

  • Free Association:

    • The client spontaneously reports thoughts, feelings, and mental images without censorship.
    • The psychoanalyst asks questions to encourage the flow of associations, providing clues to the patient’s unconscious desires.
    • As trust increases, the ego lowers, revealing the unconscious.
    • Freud emphasized that free association allows patients to speak for themselves and work through their own material, rather than repeating the analyst's ideas.

  • Resistance (“Mental Blocks”):

    • The patient consciously or unconsciously attempts to block disturbing memories, motives, and experiences.
    • The analyst notes the resistance and provides insight into its meaning.

  • Transference:

    • The process by which a patient projects or transfers unresolved conflicts and feelings onto the therapist.
    • Freud believed transference helps patients gain insight by reliving painful past relationships.
    • The therapist's role is to detect transference and help the patient understand what it reveals.

  • Psychodynamic Therapy:

    • Evolved from Freud’s original approach, based on the idea that early childhood events determine a person’s development.
    • Human behavior and dysfunction are largely influenced by the unconscious (neo-Freudians).
    • It is a less expensive and extensive therapy.
    • The relationship between the client and therapist acts as an agent of change.

  • Freud's Early Use of Hypnosis:

    • In his early practice, Freud used hypnosis with many patients, but it was not effective.
    • Relief was partial and temporary, and some patients could not be hypnotized.

  • Humanistic Therapy:

    • Aims to boost self-fulfillment by helping people grow in self-awareness and self-acceptance.
    • Focuses on the present and future more than the past.
    • Explores feelings as they occur, rather than seeking insights into childhood origins.
    • Emphasizes conscious rather than unconscious thoughts.

  • Person-Centered (Rogerian) Therapy:

    • Developed by Carl Rogers, it's one of the most widely used models in psychotherapy today.
    • It is a nondirective therapy where the therapist listens without judging or interpreting and refrains from directing the client.

  • Client-Centered Therapy Components:

    • Unconditional Positive Regard: Allows the client to steer the direction of therapy, emphasizing that all clients have value.
    • Empathy: The ability to truly see, feel, and understand what the client is experiencing.
    • Genuineness: The therapist is willing to foster an honest and open relationship.

  • Active Listening: The therapist listens to the client, paraphrasing what the client says, avoiding advice or judgments.

    • Echoing: Restating and seeking clarification of what the person expresses (verbally or nonverbally) and acknowledging the expressed feelings.
    • Example:
      • Client: “That’s what this guy I went to town with just the other day told me.”
      • Rogers: “This guy that you went to town with really told you that you were no good? Is that what you’re saying? Did I get that right?”

Behavior & Cognitive Therapy

Behavioral & Cognitive Therapies

  • Behavior Therapy:
    • Techniques are based on the theories of classical and operant conditioning.
    • The goal is to extinguish unwanted behavior and replace it with more adaptive behavior.
    • Behavioral therapy is action-based.

Behavior Therapy Based On Classical Conditioning

  • Exposure Treatments:

    • Exposure therapy is a technique in behavior therapy used to treat anxiety disorders.
    • It involves exposing the patient to the anxiety source or its context without intending to cause any danger.
    • Effective for:
      • Phobias
      • Panic Disorder
      • Social Anxiety Disorder
      • Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder
      • Posttraumatic Stress Disorder
      • Generalized Anxiety Disorder

  • Flooding:

    • Exposing people to fear-invoking objects or situations intensely and rapidly.
    • Often used to treat phobias, preventing the individual from escaping or avoiding the situation.
    • Phobia is a learned fear, and needs to be unlearned by exposure to the feared stimulus.

  • Systematic Desensitization:

    • Developed by Joseph Wolpe.
    • A client makes a list of fears and then learns to relax while concentrating on these fears.
    • The client learns to practice deep relaxation.
    • The client creates a hierarchy of anxieties (lowest to highest stimulus).
    • Led by a therapist, the client is introduced to the least feared object during deep relaxation, then the next, and so on.
    • Typically accomplished within 10 sessions.

  • Starting with the least fear-inducing item and working up to the most fear-inducing item, the client confronts these fears under the guidance of the therapist while maintaining a relaxed state.

  • Aversion Therapy:

    • Pairing an undesirable behavior with an aversive stimulus in the hope that the unwanted behavior will eventually be reduced.
    • Unpleasant consequences will eventually stop the behavior.
    • Aversion therapy and flooding can be harmful if done carelessly.
    • Antabuse is used to discourage alcohol use, as it causes extreme nausea when paired with alcohol.

Behavior Therapy Based On Operant Conditioning

  • Token Economy:
    • A behavioral strategy that relies on reinforcement to modify behavior.
    • Clients earn tokens that can be exchanged for special privileges or desired items.
    • Tokens can include poker chips, stickers, point tallies, or play money.
    • Target behaviors include self-care, medication adherence, work skills, and treatment participation.

Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy

  • Cognitive-Behavioral Therapists:

    • Human emotions and behavior are predominantly generated by ideas, beliefs, attitudes, and thinking.
    • All feelings come from thoughts.
    • Almost all negative feelings come from distorted thoughts.
    • Automatic thoughts come into our head with little to no effort.

  • Rational-Emotive Behavior Therapy (REBT):

    • Developed in the 1950s by Albert Ellis.
    • Psychological problems arise when thoughts are irrational and lead to behavioral consequences that are distressful.
    • Restructuring involves bringing the client's attention to unrealistic thoughts.

  • Aaron Beck’s Cognitive Therapy:

    • Researched by Aaron Beck.
    • Based on the idea that how we think (cognition), how we feel (emotion), and how we act (behavior) all interact.
    • Skills are learned to help change thinking patterns to be more accurate with respect to a given situation.

  • REBT (Albert Ellis) vs. CBT (Aaron Beck):

    • REBT: The therapist directly challenges the identified "irrational" thoughts (more direct).
      • Challenged thoughts with restructuring.
    • CBT: "Maladaptive" thoughts are treated like hypotheses to be tested, and both the therapist and patient work together to investigate and test those hypotheses.
      • Use of behavioral techniques, like graded exposure or systematic desensitization (hierarchy) to change or confront thoughts.

  • Three Column Technique

    • Automatic Thought
    • Distortion
    • Rational Thought/Replacement Thought

  • Follow Your Thoughts

    • Automatic Thoughts
      • This kid will never learn!
    • Intermediate Thoughts
      • So what does that mean?
        • I'm going to get a bad review.
      • And what does that mean?
        • I would get fired!
      • I wouldn't be able to support my family
        • And then what?
    • Core Beliefs
      • What does that mean about you?
        • I'm a failure!
          • Is that True? - Core Belief

  • Cognitive-Behavioral Therapists:

    • Human emotions and behavior are predominantly generated by ideas, beliefs, attitudes and thinking.
    • All of our feelings come from our thoughts.
    • Almost all negative feelings come from distorted thoughts.
    • We have automatic thoughts that come into our head with little to no effort.

  • We tend to generate thinking errors when suffering conflict, poor stability, or stressful events.

    • Black and White Thinking
    • Filtering out the Positive
    • Fortune-telling
    • Emotional Reasoning
    • Labeling
    • Overgeneralization
    • Mind Reading
    • Catastrophizing/Magnification
    • Should Statements
    • Personalization or Blame
    • All or Nothing Thinking

  • Cognitive Distortions

    • Disqualifying the positive
      • Discounting the good things that have happened or that you have done for some reason or another
        • That doesn't count
    • All or nothing thinking
      • Sometimes called 'black and white thinking'
        • If I'm not perfect I have failed
        • Either I do it right or not at all
    • Magnification (catastrophising) & minimisation
      • Blowing things out of proportion (catastrophising), or inappropriately shrinking something to make it seem less important
    • Emotional reasoning
      • Assuming that because we feel a certain way what we think must be true.
        • I feel embarrassed so I must be an idiot
    • Should statements
      • Using critical words like should should 'must', or 'ought' must can make us feel guilty, or like we have already failed
      • If we apply 'shoulds' to other people the result is often frustration
    • Jumping to conclusions
      • 2+2=5
      • There are two key types of jumping to conclusions:
        • Mind reading (imagining we know what others are thinking)
        • Fortune telling (predicting the future)
    • Labelling
      • Assigning labels to oursleves or other people
        • I'm a loser
        • I'm completely useless
        • They're such an idiot
    • Personalisation
      • Blaming yourself or taking responsibility for something that wasn't completely your fault.
        • this is my fault
      • Conversely, blaming other people for something that was your fault.
    • Over-generallsing
      • Seeing a pattern based upon a single event, or being overly broad in the conclusions we draw
        • everything is always rubbish
        • nothing good ever happens