Psychology Chapter 13: Therapy

Biomedical therapy

prescribed medications or procedures that act directly on the person's physiology.

Psychosurgery

surgery that removes or destroys brain tissue in an effort to change behavior.

Psychoanalysis

Sigmund Freud's therapeutic technique. Freud believed the patient's free associations, resistances, dreams, and transferences - and the therapist's interpretations of them - released previously repressed feelings, allowing the patient to gain self-insight.

Psychodynamic therapy

a Freud-influenced perspective that sees behavior, thinking, and emotions in terms of unconscious motives.

Counterconditioning

a behavior therapy procedure that uses classical conditioning to evoke new responses to stimuli that are triggering unwanted behaviors; includes exposure therapies and aversive conditioning.

Unconditional positive regard

a caring, accepting, nonjudgmental attitude, which Carl Rogers believed would help clients to develop self-awareness and self-acceptance.

Client-centered therapy

a humanistic therapy, developed by Carl Rogers, in which the therapist uses techniques such as active listening within a genuine, accepting, emphatic environment to facilitate clients' growth. (Also called person-centered therapy.)

Cognitive-behavioral therapy

a popular integrative therapy that combines cognitive therapy (changing self-defeating thinking) with behavior therapy (changing behavior).

Aversive conditioning

a type of counterconditioning that associates an unpleasant state (such as nausea) with an unwanted behavior (such as drinking alcohol).

Systematic desensitization

a type of exposure therapy that associates a pleasant relaxed state with gradually increasing anxiety-triggering stimuli. Commonly used to treat phobias.

Virtual Reality Exposure Therapy

an anxiety treatment that progressively exposes people to simulations of their greatest fears, such as airplane flying, spiders, or public speaking.

Eclectic approach

an approach to psychotherapy that, depending on the client's problems, uses techniques from various forms of therapy.

Token economy

an operant conditioning procedure in which people earn a token of some sort for exhibiting a desired behavior and can later exchange the tokens for various privileges or treats.

Exposure therapies

behavioral techniques, such as systematic desensitization and virtual reality exposure therapy, that treat anxieties by exposing people (in imagination or actual situations) to the things they fear and avoid.

Active listening

empathetic listening in which the listener echoes, restates, and clarifies. A feature of Rogers' client-centered therapy.

Family therapy

therapy that treats the family as a system.. Views an individual's unwanted behaviors as influenced by or directed at other family members.

Behavior therapy

therapy that applies learning principles to the elimination of unwanted behaviors.

Cognitive therapy

therapy that teaches people new, more adaptive ways of thinking and acting; based on the assumption that thoughts intervene between events and our emotional reactions.

Psychotherapy

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