Cognitive-Behavioral Family Therapy

Mind Reading

This is the magical gift of knowing what other people are thinking w/o the aid of verbal communication. ex. A husband doesn't ask his wife what she wants because he "knows what's going on in her mind"

Token economies

use points to reward children for good behavior

Behavior Exchange Theory

A good relationship is one in which giving and getting are balanced. Thus, it is the balance of costs and rewards that determines family satisfaction.

Cognitive Mediation Model

Actions ar emendated by specific cognitions. Understanding these cognitions makes it possible to identify factors that trigger and maintain dysfunctional emotional and behavioral patterns. In practice, this boils down to uncovering hidden assumptions that keep people stuck.

Labeling and Mislabeling

Behavior is attributed to undesirable personality traits. ex. A women who avoids talking with her mom about her career because her mother always criticizes (this is withholding)

Development of Behavior Disorders

Behaviorists view symptoms as learned responses. They don't look for hidden motives or blame marital for children's problems. Instead, they look for specific responses that reinforce problem behavior.

Selective Abstraction (Cog. Distortion)

Certain details are high-lighted while other important info is ignored. Ex. A woman whose husband fails to answer her greeting first thing in the morning concludes, "He must be angry at me again."

Arbitrary Inference (Cog. Distortion)

Conclusions are drawn in the absence of supporting evidence. ex. A man whose wife arrives home late from work concludes, "She must be having an affair"

Reinforcers

Consequences that accelerate behavior

Punishers

Consequences that decelerate behavior

Contingency management

Consists of giving and taking away rewards based on children's behavior

Aversive Control

Crying, nagging, withdrawing. It is a major determinant of marital unhappiness.

Arbitrary Inference

Distorted conclusions, shaped by a person's schemas, or core beliefs. What makes these underlying beliefs problematic is that although they are generally not conscious, they bias how we respond to everything and everyone.

Personalization

Events are arbitrarily interpreted in reference to oneself. Ex. A teen wants to spend more time with his friends, so his father assumes that his son doesn't enjoy his company.

Dichotomous thinking

Experiences are interpreted as all good or all bad. ex. jack and diane have some good times and some bad times, but he remembers only the good, while she remembers only the bad.

Systematic Desensitization (Skinner)

Great success in the treatment of phobias. It reconditions anxiety by pairing responses incompatible with anxiety to previously anxiety-arousing stimuli.

Premack Principle

High probability behavior (popular activities) is chosen to reinforce behavior with a low probability occurrence. Ex. getting a boy to clean his room for candy doesn't work because he doesn't really care about the candy. However, he will be more likely to clean it if he gets to watch TV, as this is a popular activity.

Quid pro quo

In a quid pro quo contract, one partner agrees to make a change after a prior change by the other.

Goal of Family Behavior Therapy

Increase the rate of rewarding exchanges, decrease aversive exchanges, and teach communication and problem-solving skills. More contemporary approaches to cut have expanded this approach to include the examination and restructuring of thoughts and perceptions

Contingency contracting

Involves agreements by parents to make certain changes following changes made by their children

time out

Is a punishment where children are made to sit in the corner or sent to their rooms

Overgeneralization

Isolated incidents are taken as general patterns. Ex. After being turned down for a date, the man thinks, "Women don't like me."

Assessment

Most are based on SORKC model of behavior: S for stimulus, O for the state of the organism, R for the target response, and KC for the contingency of consequences. For family therapy, the goals of CBT assessment are (1) identify strengths and problems in individuals the couple or family, and the environment. (2) place individual and family functioning in the context of developmental stages. (3) identify cognitive, emotional, and behavioral aspects of family interaction that might be targeted for intervention.

Theory of Social Exchange

People strive to maximize rewards and minimize costs in relationships. In a successful relationship, partners work to maximize mutual rewards. In unsuccessful relationships, the partners are too busy protecting themselves from getting hurt to consider how to make each other happy.

Shaping

Reinforcing change in small steps

Operant Conditioning (Skinner)

Skinner taught us that behavior is regulated by its consequences. Responses that are positively reinforced will be increased; those that are punished or ignored will be extinguished.

Therapeutic Techniques

The therapist decides which behaviors should be increased and which decreased. CBT assumes that members of a family simultaneously influence and are influenced by each other. The behavior of one family member triggers behavior, cognitions, and emotions in other members, which in turn elicit reactive cognitions, behavior, and emotions in the original member.

How Therapy Works

The basic premise of therapy is that behavior will change when the contingencies of reinforcement are altered. Behavioral family therapy aims to resolve targeted family problems through identifying behavioral goals, learning theory techniques for achieving these goals, and social reinforcers to facilitate this process.

Magnification and minimization

The significance of events is unrealistically magnified or diminished. For example, a husband considers the two times in one month he shops for groceries as fulfilling his share of household duties, while his wife thinks, "he never does anything"