Psychodynamic Therapies

• Insight: the conscious awareness of the psychodynamics that underlies their problems

• Free Association:  clients verbally report without censorship any thoughts, feelings, or images that enter their awareness

• Resistance: defensive maneuvers that hinder the process of therapy

• Interpretation: any statement by the therapist that is intended to provide the client with insight into his or her behavior or dynamics

• Interpersonal Therapy: focuses almost exclusively on clients’ current relationships with important people in their lives

Humanistic Psychotherapies

• Unconditional Positive Regard:  is communicated when the therapist shows that he or she genuinely cares about and accepts the client, without judgment or evaluation.

• Empathy: the willingness and ability to view the world through the client’s eyes, is a second vital factor

• Genuineness:  refers to consistency between the way the therapist feels and the way he or she behaves.

Behavior Therapies

• Exposure: to the feared CS in the absence of the UCS while using response prevention.

• Response Prevention:  to keep the operant avoidance response from occurring

• Virtual Reality (VR): involves the use of computer technology to create highly realistic virtual environments that simulate actual experience so vividly that they evoke many of the same reactions that a comparable real-world environment would

• Systematic Desensitization:  a learning-based treatment for anxiety disorders

• Counterconditioning:  in which a new response that is incompatible with anxiety is conditioned to the anxiety-arousing CS

• Stimulus Hierarchy: of 10 to 20 scenes arranged in roughly equal steps from low-anxiety scenes to high-anxiety ones

• Aversion Therapy: the therapist pairs a stimulus that is attractive to the client (the CS) with a noxious UCS in an attempt to condition an aversion to the CS

• Behavior Modification: refers to treatment techniques that apply operant conditioning procedures in an attempt to increase or decrease a specific behavior

• Mindfulness: is a mental state of awareness, focus, openness, and acceptance of immediate experience.

• Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT): focuses on the process of mindfulness as a vehicle for change

• Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT):  is a treatment developed specifically for the treatment of borderline personality disorder.

Cultural and Gender Issues in Psychotherapy

• Cultural Congruence: treatment that is consistent with cultural beliefs and expectations

• Culturally Competent Therapists: are able to use knowledge about the client’s culture to achieve a broad understanding of the client.

• Feminist Therapy: focuses on women’s issues and strives to help women achieve greater personal freedom and self-determination

Biological Approaches to Treatment

• Tardive Dyskinesia:  a severe movement disorder

• Psychosurgery: refers to surgical procedures that remove or destroy brain tissue in an attempt to change disordered behavior.

Evaluating Treatments

• Specificity Question: Which types of therapy administered by which kinds of therapists to which kinds of clients having which kinds of problems produce which kinds of effects?

• Randomized Clinical Trial (RCT):  in which clients are randomly assigned to treatment or control conditions, and the treatment and control groups are compared on outcome measures

• Placebo Control Group: that gets an intervention that is not expected to work

• Empirically Supported Treatments (ESTs): treatments that had been demonstrated in several independent studies to be efficacious for treating specific disorders

• Meta-Analysis: allows researchers to combine the statistical results of many studies to arrive at an overall conclusion

• Effect Size:  tells researchers what percentage of clients who received therapy had a more favorable outcome than that of the average control client who did not receive the treatment.

• Dodo Bird Verdict: finding of similar efficacy for widely differing therapies has been termed

• Openness:  involves clients’ general willingness to invest themselves in therapy and take the risks required to change themselves

• Self-Relatedness:  refers to their ability to experience and understand internal states such as thoughts and emotions, to be attuned to the processes that go on in their relationships with their therapists, and to apply what they learn in therapy to their lives outside of treatment.

• Common Factors: characteristics shared by these diverse forms of therapy that might contribute to their success

• Deinstitutionalization Movement: to transfer the primary focus of treatment from the hospital to the community

• Situation-Focused Prevention: directed at either reducing or eliminating the environmental causes of behavior disorders or enhancing situational factors that help prevent the development of disorders

• Competence-Focused Prevention: designed to increase personal resources and coping skills