Clinical Psychology Flashcards
Psychotherapy
Treatment involving psychological techniques; consists of interactions between a trained therapist and someone seeking to overcome psychological difficulties or achieve personal growth.
Biomedical Therapy
Prescribed medications or procedures that act directly on the person’s physiology.
Eclectic Approach
An approach to psychotherapy that uses techniques from various forms of therapy.
Psychoanalysis
Psychoanalysis therapy, developed by Sigmund Freud, aims to explore unconscious conflicts and desires by delving into a patient’s past experiences, dreams, and free associations, ultimately seeking to bring repressed thoughts and emotions into conscious awareness to promote psychological healing and growth.
Resistance (Psychanalysis)
The blocking from consciousness of anxiety-laden material.
Interpretation (Psychanalysis)
The analyst’s noting supposed dream meanings, resistances, and other significant behavior sand events in order to promote insight.
Transference
The patient’s transfer to the analyst of emotions linked with other relationships.
Psychodynamic Therapy
Therapy deriving from the psychoanalytic tradition; views individuals as responding to unconscious forces and childhood experiences, and seeks to enhance self-insight.
Insight Therapy
Therapies that aim to improve psychological functioning by increasing a person’s awareness of underlying motives and defenses.
Client-Centered Therapy
A humanistic therapy, developed by Carl Rogers, in which the therapist uses techniques such as active listening within an accepting, genuine, emphatic environment to facilitate clients’ growth.
Active Listening
Emphatic listening in which the listener echoes, restates, and clarifies. A feature of Roger’s client-centered therapy.
Unconditional Positive Regard
A caring, accepting, nonjudgemental attitude, which Carl Rogers believes would help clients develop self-awareness and self-acceptance.
Behavior Therapy
Therapy that applies learning principles to the elimination of unwanted behaviors.
Counterconditioning
Behavior therapy procedures that use classical conditioning to evoke new responses to stimuli that are triggering unwanted behaviors; include exposure therapies and aversive conditioning.
Exposure Therapies
Behavioral techniques, such as systematic desensitization and virtual reality exposure therapy, that treat anxieties by exposing people to the things they fear and avoid.
Systematic Desensitization
A type of exposure therapy that associates a pleasant relaxed state which gradually increasing anxiety-triggering stimuli. Commonly used to treat phobias.
Virtual Reality Exposure Therapy
A counterconditioning technique that treats anxiety through creative electronic stimulations in which people can safely face their greatest fears, such as airplane flying, spiders, or public speaking.
Aversive Conditioning
A type of counterconditioning that associates an unpleasant state with an unwanted behavior.
Token Economy
An operant conditioning procedure in which people earn a token for exhibiting a desired behavior and can later exchange tokens for privileges or treats.
Cognitive Therapy
Therapy that teaches people new, more adaptive ways of thinking; based on the assumption that thoughts intervene between events and our emotional reactions. (Aaron Beck)
Rational-Emotive Behavior Therapy (REBT)
A confrontational cognitive therapy, developed by Albert Ellis, that vigorously challenges people’s illogical, self-defeating attitudes and assumptions.
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT)
A popular integrative therapy that combines cognitive therapy with behavior therapy.
Group Therapy
Therapy conducted with groups rather than individuals, providing benefits from group interaction.
Family Therapy
Therapy that treats people in the context of their family system. Views an individual’s unwanted behaviors as influenced by, or directed at, other family members.
Major Depressive Disorder
A disorder in which a person experiences, in the absence of drugs or another medical condition, two or more weeks with five or more symptoms, at least one of which must be either (1) depressed mood or (2) loss of interest or pleasure.
Rumination
Compulsive fretting; overthinking our problems and their causes.
Bipolar Disorder
A disorder in which a person alternates between the hopelessness and lethargy of depression and the overexcited state of mania.
Mania
A hyperactive, wildly optimistic state in which dangerously poor judgement is common.
Schizophrenia
A disorder characterized by delusions, hallucinations, disorganized speech, and/or diminished, inappropriate emotional expression.
Psychotic Disorder
A group of disorders marked by irrational ideas, distorted perceptions, and a loss of contact with reality.
