Behavioural Theories Flashcards
What is it called when removal of a reward makes a behaviour less likely?
Extinction
What type of psychotropic drug is fluoxetine (Prozac)?
Selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor.
What is biological preparedness?
Phobias develop for things that are more likely to be dangerous, e.g snakes
What three behavioural symptoms of anxiety does CBT allow patients to drop?
Avoidance behaviours
Safety behaviours
Asking for reassurance
What is learning?
A relatively permanent change in behaviour which occurs as a result of experience, essential for enabling an organism to adapt to its environment.
Which part of the medial temporal lobe, which is involved in fear and stimulating the HPA axis, is also involved in learning?
Amygdala
What are the 4 types of learning?
Associative - learning that events go together (operant and classical conditioning)
Vicarious - learning by direct observation (modelling)
Factual transmission
Complex - social learning, emotional intelligence, managing people and your own emotions
What is the difference between operant and classical conditioning?
In classical conditioning the subject is passive and learns one event predicts another stimulus.
In operant conditioning the subject is active and learns a particular response predicts an event.
What is classical conditioning?
A previously neutral stimulus becomes associated with another stimulus by repeated pairing.
What is operant conditioning?
Certain responses are learnt because the affect the environment, and behaviour is altered by reward or punishment.
How do operant and classical conditioning relate to phobias?
Classical conditioning is responsible for the origin of phobias, operant conditioning is responsible for the maintenance of phobias (by negative reinforcement).
What are the four steps of classical conditioning?
1) start with an unconditioned stimulus that produces an unconditioned response (the response is natural and innate)
2) next have a conditioned stimulus that on its own produced no response
3) pair the conditioned stimulus to the unconditioned stimulus to elicit the unconditioned response (conditioning phase)
4) after repeated pairing, the conditioned stimulus alone will produce the conditioned response
What is it called if behaviour is increased by a stimulus being given?
Positive reinforcement
What is it called if behaviour is increased by a stimulus being removed?
Negative reinforcement
What is it called if behaviour is decreased by a stimulus being given?
Punishment
What is it called if behaviour is decreased by a stimulus being removed?
Extinction
What is Thorndike’s law of effect (the basis of operant conditioning)?
A successful behaviour will be repeated
What is the difference between primary and secondary reinforcers?
Primary reinforcers represent an innate biological need e.g water, food
Secondary reinforcers are things that are not necessary for survival e.g money, praise, attention
What does the reinforcer need to be for operant conditioning to be successful?
Immediate
What are the types of positive reinforcers and which are the most successful?
Continuous
Partial (more successful than continuous)
Ratio schedules (reinforcement given after a certain number of responses)
Interval schedules (reinforcement given at certain time intervals)
Fixed (predictable)
Variable (unpredictable)
Variable ratio reinforcement is the most effective and has the slowest extinction BUT continuous reinforcement is necessary to initially establish the behaviour.
What are the two ways complex actions can be learned by positive reinforcement?
Shaping - reward behaviours as they become increasingly approximate to the desired behaviour
Chaining - break complex behaviours down into a series of simple acts
What is negative reinforcement?
An aversive stimulus is removed after a desired behaviour has occured, so the likelihood of the behaviour occurring again is increased.
What are the three types of phobias?
Agoraphobia - fear of public places, crowds, shops
Social phobia - fear of eating, speaking, performing in front of other people
Specific phobia - fear of specific object
What is escape learning?
Phobic stimulus -> anxiety -> avoidance or escape -> anxiety reduced
What is graded exposure?
Graded exposure is used to treat phobias, it is deliberate confrontation of a feared object or situation until the anxiety evoked reduces (habituation).
What is habituation?
Reduction in strength of response to a repeated stimulus (non-associative learning).
SMART targets are essential in treating phobias, what are they?
Targets that are: Specific Measurable Achievable Realistic Timed
What is punishment?
An unpleasant stimulus after an undesirable behaviour has occured, to reduce the liklihood of the behaviour occurring again.
What are the problems with administering punishment to change behaviour?
May cause physical or emotional harm
Gives paradoxical attention so acts as positive reinforcer
Teaches aggression as a model to solve difficulties
Doesn’t provide alternative behaviour
Can lead to fear/dislike of person/situation
What is extinction?
Decreasing a behaviour by withholding a previous reward (the positive reinforcer in operant conditioning, the unconditioned stimulus in classical conditioning).
What is the vicious cycle of depression and inactivity?
Anhedonia leads to doing less, which leads to achieving less and losing confidence and spending more time ruminating on negative thoughts, which leads to a low mood, which increases anhedonia
What is behavioural activation?
Used to stop the vicious cycle of inactivity in depression, remove the avoidance and reverse the learned helplessness.
Use an activity diary to allow person to regain sense of control, and set goals and SMART targets.
Behavioural activation reintroduces positive reinforcers.
What was the therapy used to treat anxiety disorders before CBT that was based on operant and classical conditioning?
Behavioural therapy
Whose work is CBT based on?
Beck
What do NICE guidelines (based on systematic reviews of randomised trials) recommend CBT for treatment of?
Generalised anxiety disorder Panic disorder Obsessive compulsive disorder Post traumatic stress disorder Social anxiety disorder
What two things make CBT a better treatment option than psychotropic drugs in a lot of situations?
There aren’t the harmful side effects
The beneficial effect lasts longer, and coping skills learned can be used again in the event of a relapse
What is Beck’s cognitive model of emotional disorders?
1) Early experience - leads to formation of core beliefs
2) Core beliefs - absolute statements about self, world and future
3) Assumptions - rules for living that grow out of the core beliefs, usually conditional statements
4) Schema activation - life event activates cognitive schema which then distorts the way incoming information is processed/interpreted
5) Negative automatic thoughts - activated schema leads to a constant barrage of negative thoughts, which maintain the cognition through feedback loops
6) Emotional, biases, behavioural, physical effects
What is meant by cognitive mediation?
It’s not the actual situation, but your cognition/interpretation of the situation which makes you pathologically anxious.
Which type of behaviours prevent the cognition change and how?
Safety behaviours prevent the inaccurate cognition being updated/tested by reality (prevent unambiguous disconformation of the cognition).
What is a safety behaviour?
Behaviour designed to avert a feared consequence (but has the paradoxical effect of maintaining the problem by preventing unambiguous disconformation of the cognition).
Safety behaviours increase anxiety symptoms.
What are the two main strategies to change the cognition that is causing the anxiety response?
Talk about the cognition - using Socratic questioning, verbal reattribution, thought challenging, to determine if the thought is accurate and helpful
Behavioural experiment - do something to test the accuracy of the thought
What is the key behavioural experiment?
Identify the safety behaviour, go into anxiety promoting situation, drop safety behaviour, new information can then be received to change cognition.
What is Socratic questioning?
Questions to find out why people believe what they believe - put the thought on trial.
How is Socratic questioning used in CBT?
Used to put the thought on trial, encourage the person to think through why they believe what they believe.
What are the 5 key types of questions in Socratic questioning?
1) Definition - define the key terms (often shows the label they give themselves doesn’t actually fit at all)
2) Evidence - what evidence do they have for the belief, how good is the evidence?
3) Counter-Evidence - do they know of any evidence that doesn’t fit with the thought?
4) Alternative Explanations - are there other ways of looking at the situation and the incoming information?
5) Thinking Errors - unhelpful thinking styles e.g overgeneralising, mind reading, disqualifying the positive, personalisation
What is a behavioural experiment?
The therapist and patient working together to do something to test the validity of the thought.
How could you do a behavioural experiment?
Video the person in the anxiety promoting situation when they are using their safety behaviours and when they aren’t.
Compare how they thought they would look when not using the safety behaviours to how they actually looked.
What are two types of cognition seen in OCD?
Thought-event fusion (having a bad thought will make a bad thing happen)
Thought-action fusion (having a bad thought will make you act in a bad way)
What is an unconditioned stimulus?
One that automatically or naturally leads to a particular response (so a conditioned stimulus is one that begins as a neutral stimulus).
What does the Primacy effect suggest is the information an individual is most likely to remember from a consultation?
The information you gave them first.
