Ch. 16 Therapy Flashcards
Psychoanalytic and Humanistic Therapies:
insight therapies—they attempt to improve functioning by increasing clients’ awareness of motives and defenses.
behaviour therapies:
not insight therapies. Their goal is to apply learning principles to modify problem behaviors.
what is Psychotherapy:
Involves psychological techniques derived from psychological perspectives; trained therapist uses psychological techniques to assist someone seeking to overcome difficulties or achieve personal growth
what is biomedical therapy:
Involves treatment with medical procedures; trained therapist, most often a medical doctor, offers medications and other biological treatments
Eclectic Approach is?
An approach that uses techniques from various forms of therapy
Psychoanalysis Therapy:
- Goals: To bring patients’ repressed feelings into conscious awareness; to help patients release energy devoted to id-ego-superego conflicts so they may achieve healthier, less anxious lives.
- Techniques: Historical reconstruction, initially through hypnosis and later through free association; interpretation ( noting dream meanings and other significant behaviours) of resistance(blocking from conciousness of anxiety-laden material), transference( the patients transfer to the analyst of emotions linked with other relationships (such as love or hatred for a parent)
Psychodynamic Therapy:
- Goals: To help people understand current symptoms; to explore and gain perspective on defended-against thoughts and feelings
- Techniques: Client-centered face-to-face meetings; exploration of past relationship troubles to understand origins of current difficulties
Psychodynamic therapy
Influenced by traditional psychoanalysis but differs from it in many ways
Differences
Lack of belief in id, ego, and superego
Briefer, less expensive, and more focused on helping the client find relief from current symptoms
Helps clients understand how past relationships create themes that may be acted out in present relationships
Interpersonal therapy
Brief 12- to 16-session form of psychodynamic therapy that has been effective in treating depression
Humanistic Therapy:
- Theme: Emphasis on people’s potential for self-fulfillment; to give people new insights
- Goals: To reduce inner conflicts that interfere with natural development and growth; help clients grow in self-awareness and self-acceptance promoting personal growth
- Techniques: Client-centered therapy; focus on taking responsibility for feelings and actions and on present and future rather than past
Rogers: (active listening)
Person-centered therapy focuses on person’s conscious self-perceptions; non-directive; active listening; unconditional positive regard
Most people possess resources for growth
Therapists foster growth by exhibiting genuineness, acceptance, and empathy
Behaviour Therapies:
- Classical conditioning techniques
- Counterconditioning: Uses classical conditioning to evoke new responses to stimuli that are triggering unwanted behaviors
- Exposure therapies: Treat anxieties by exposing people (in imagination or actual situations) to the things they fear and avoid
- Systematic desensitization: Associates a pleasant, relaxed state with gradually increasing, anxiety-triggering stimuli
Aversive conditioning
Goal: Substituting negative response for a positive response to a harmful stimulus; conditioning an aversion to something the person should avoid
Techniques: Unwanted behavior is associated with unpleasant feelings; ability to discriminate between aversive conditioning situation in therapy and all other situations can limit treatment effectiveness
- Operant conditioning therapy: Consequences drive behavior: voluntary behaviors are strongly influenced by their consequences
- Behavior modification: Desired behavior reinforced; undesired behavior not reinforced, sometimes punished
- Token economy: People earn a token for exhibiting a desired behavior and can later exchange the tokens for privileges or treats
Critics maintain
-Techniques such as those used in token economies may produce behavior changes that disappear when rewards end.
Deciding which behaviors should change is authoritarian and unethical.
Proponents argue
-Treatment with positive rewards is more humane than punishing people or institutionalizing them for undesired behaviors.
What is virtual reality exposure therapy:
Treats anxiety by creative electronic simulations in which people can safely face their greatest fears, such as airplane flying, spiders, or public speaking
Cognitive Therapies:
-Cognitive therapies
Teaches people new, more adaptive ways of thinking; based on the assumption that thoughts intervene between events and our emotional reactions
-Beck’s therapy for depression
Gentle questioning seeks to reveal irrational thinking and then to persuade people to change their perceptions of their own and others’ actions as dark, negative, and pessimistic
People trained to recognize and modify negative self-talk
Cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT):
-Is integrative therapy that combines cognitive therapy (changing self-defeating thinking) with behavior therapy (changing behavior)
-Aims to alter the way they act AND they way they think
Helps people learn to make more realistic appraisals
Group and Family Therapies:
- Group therapy
- Conducted with groups rather than individuals, providing benefits from group interaction
- Often used when client problems involve interactions with others
- Group therapy benefits
- Saves therapists’ time and clients’ money
- Encourages exploration of social behaviors and social skill development
- Enables people to see that others share their problems
- Provides feedback as clients try out new ways of behaving
Family therapy
- Attempts to open up communication within the family and help family members to discover and use conflict resolution strategies
- Treats the family as a system
- Views an individual’s unwanted behaviors as influenced by, or directed at, other family members
Is psychotherapy effective:
- Clients’ and therapists’ positive testimonials cannot prove that psychotherapy is actually effective.
- The placebo effect makes it difficult to judge whether improvement occurred because of the treatment.
- Research indicates that those not undergoing treatment often improve, but those undergoing psychotherapy are more likely to improve more quickly, and with less chance of relapse.
Which psychotherapies work best:
- Some forms of psychotherapy work best for particular problems.
- Behavior therapies: Bed-wetting, phobias, compulsions, marital problems, and sexual dysfunctions
- Psychodynamic therapy: Depression and anxiety
- Cognitive therapies: Anxiety, depression, and posttraumatic stress disorder
- Evidence-based practice: Integration of best available research with clinicians’ expertise and patients’ characteristics, preferences, and circumstances
Alternative Therapies:
- Alternative therapies:
- Abnormal states often return to normal and the placebo effect can mislead effectiveness evaluation
- Eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR)
- Some effectiveness shown—not from the eye movement but rather from the exposure therapy nature of the treatments
- Light exposure therapy:
- Relief from depression symptoms for those with a seasonal pattern of major depressive disorder by activating a brain region that influences arousal and hormones
