Cognitive Behavior Therapy Vocab
Coping Skills Program
A behavioral procedure for helping clients deal effectively with stressful situations by learning to modify their thinking patterns.
Selective Abstraction
A cognitive distortion that involves forming conclusions based on an isolated detail of an event.
Dichotomous Thinking
A cognitive error that involves categorizing experiences in either-or extremes.
Stress Inoculation Training
A form of cognitive behavior modification developed by Donald Meichenbaum that is a combination of information giving, Socratic discussion, cognitive restructuring, problem solving, relaxation training, behavioral rehearsals, self-monitoring, self-instruction, self-reinforcement, and modifying situations.
Arbitrary Infrences
A form of cognitive distortion that refers to making conclusions without supporting and relevant evidence.
Rational Emotive Imagery
A form of intense mental practice for learning new emotional and physical habits. Clients imagine themselves thinking, feeling, and behaving in exactly the way they would like to in everyday situations.
Cognitive triad
A pattern that triggers depression.
Overgeneralization
A process by holding extreme beliefs on the basis of a single incident and applying them inappropriately to dissimilar events of settings.
Cognitive Restructuring
A process of actively altering maladaptive thought patterns and replacing them with constructive and adaptive thoughts and beliefs.
Socratic Dialogue
A process that cognitive therapists use in helping clients empirically test their core beliefs. Clients form hypotheses about their behavior through observation and monitoring.
Therapeutic Collaboration
A process whereby the therapist strives to engage the client's active participation in all phases on therapy.
Constructivist Approach
A recent development in cognitive therapy that emphasizes the subjective framework and interpretations of the client rather than looking to the objective bases of faulty beliefs.
Collaborative Empiricism
A strategy of viewing the client as a scientist who is able to make objective interpretations. The process in which therapist and client work together to phrase the client's faulty beliefs as hypotheses and design homework to that the client can test these hypotheses.
Shame-attacking Exercises
A strategy used in REBT therapy that encourages people to do things despite a fear of feeling foolish or embarrassed. The aim of the exercise is to teach people that they can function effectively even if they might be perceived as doing foolish acts.
Personalization
A tendency for people to relate external events to themselves, even when there is no basis for making this connection.
Musturbation
A term to refer to behavior that is absolutist and rigid. We tell ourselves that we MUST, SHOULD, or OUGHT TO do or be something.
Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy
A theory that is based on the assumption that cognitions, emotions, and behaviors interact significantly and have a reciprocal cause-and-effect relationships.
Cognitive Behavior Modification
A therapeutic approach that sims at changing cognitions that are leading to psychological problems.
Cognitive Behavior Therapy
A treatment approach that aims at changing cognitions that are leading to psychological problems.
Cognitive Therapy
An approach and set of procedures that attempts to change feelings and behavior by modifying faulty thinking and believing.
Constructivist Narrative Perspective
An approach that focuses on the stories that people tell about themselves and others regarding significant events in their lives.
Self-instructional Therapy
An approach to therapy based on the assumption that what people say to themselves directly influences the things they do. Training consists of learning new self-talk aimed at coping with problems.
Irrational Belief
An unreasonable conviction that leads to emotional and behavioral problems.
Homework
Carefully designed and agreed upon assignments aimed at getting clients to carry out positive actions that induce emotional and attitudinal change. These assignments are checked in later sessions, ans clients learn effective ways to dispute self-defeating thinking.
Schema
Core beliefs that are centrally related to dysfunctional behaviors. The process of cognitive therapy involves restructuring distorted core beliefs.
Distortion of Reality
Erroneous thinking that disrupts one's life; can be contradicted by the client's objective appraisal of the situation.
Cognitive Distortions
In cognitive therapy, the client's misconceptions and faulty assumptions.
Stress Inoculation
Individuals are given opportunities to deal with relatively mild stress stimuli in successful ways, so that they gradually develop a tolerance for stronger stimuli.
Automatic Thoughts
Maladapative thoughts that appear to arise reflexively, without conscious deliberation.
Relapse Prevention
Procedure for promotion long-term maintenance that involves identifying situations in which clients are likely to regress to old patterns and to develop coping skills in such situations.
ABC Model of Personality
Temporal sequence of antecedents, behavior and consequences. The theory that people's problems do not stem from activating events, but rather from their beliefs about such events. Thus, the best route to changing problematic emotions is to change one's beliefs about situations.
Cognitive Structure
The organizing aspect of thinking, which monitors and directs the choice of thoughts; implies an "executive processor," one that determines when to continue, interrupt, or change thinking patterns.
Rationality
The quality of thinking, feeling, and acting in ways that will help us attain our goals. Irrationality consists of thinking, feeling, and acting in ways that are self-defeating and that thwart our goals.
Internal Dialogue
The sentences that people tell themselves and the debate that often goes on "inside their head"; a form of self-talk or inner speech.
Self-talk
What people "say" to themselves when that are thinking. The internal dialogue that goes on within an individual stressful situations.
