HPS121-T2-Ch16-Treating Psychological Disorders Flashcards
Acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT):
a recently developed ‘third-wave’ behaviour therapy that focuses on mindfulness, accepting negative feelings and identifying core values.
Aversion therapy:
a form of therapy in which a conditioned stimulus that currently evokes a positive but maladaptive response is paired with a noxious, unpleasant unconditioned stimulus, in an attempt to condition repulsion toward the conditioned stimulus.
Behavioural activation:
a treatment for depression that engages clients life activities designed to increase positive reinforcement in their lives.
Behaviour modification:
therapeutic procedures based on operant conditioning principles, such as positive reinforcement, operant extinction and punishment.
Common factors:
therapeutic elements that are possessed by virtually any type of therapy and that may contribute to the similar positive effects shown by many different treatment approaches.
Competency-focused prevention:
prevention programs that are designed to enhance personal resources needed to cope with situations that might otherwise cause psychological disorders.
Counterconditioning:
the process of conditioning an incompatible response to a particular stimulus to eliminate a maladaptive response (e.g. anxiety), as occurs in systematic desensitisation.
Cultural congruence:
the extent to which a form of treatment is consistent with the culture of a particular ethnic group.
Culturally competent therapist:
practitioners who have a set of therapeutic skills, including scientific mindedness, the ability to consider both cultural and individual factors and the capacity to introduce culture-specific elements into therapy with people from diverse cultures.
Deinstitutionalisation movement:
the attempt to move the primary locus of treatment from mental hospitals to the community.
Dialectical behaviour therapy (DBT):
a recently developed cognitive- behavioural treatment for borderline personality disorder.
Dodo bird verdict:
the conclusion reached by some psychotherapy researchers that virtually all treatment processes have similar success rates.
Effect size:
in meta-analysis, a measure of treatment effectiveness that indicates what percentage of treated clients improve more than the average untreated client.
Empathy:
the capacity for experiencing the same emotional response being exhibited by another person; in therapy, the ability of a therapist to view the world through the client’s eyes and to understand the clients emotions.
Empirically supported treatments (ESTs):
psychotherapy and behaviour change techniques that have been shown to be efficacious in controlled clinical trials.
Exposure:
a behaviour treatment therapy in which clients are presented, either in vivo or in their imagination, with fear-inducing stimuli, thus allowing extinctions to occur.
Feminist therapy:
an orientation that focuses on women’s issues and strives to help female clients achieve greater self-determination.
Free association:
in psychoanalysis, the procedure of verbalising all thoughts that come into consciousness without censorship.
Genuineness:
the ability of a therapist to honestly express her or his feelings to a client.
Insight:
in Gestalt psychology, the sudden perception of a useful relation or solution to a problem; in psychoanalysis, the conscious awareness of unconscious dynamics that underlie psychological problems.
Interpersonal therapy:
a form of brief therapy that focuses on the client’s interpersonal problems and seeks to develop new interpersonal skills.
Interpretation:
in psychoanalysis, a statement made by the analyst that is intended to promote insight in the client.
Meta-analysis:
a statistical procedure for combining the results of different studies that examine the same topic.
Mindfulness:
a mental state of awareness, focus, openness and acceptance of immediate experience.
Openness:
the client’s willingness to become personally invested in the process of therapy that predicts favourable therapeutic outcomes.
Placebo control group:
a control group that receives an intervention that is assumed to have no therapeutic value.
Psychosurgery:
surgical procedures, such as lobotomy or cingulotomy, in which brain tissue involved in a behaviour disorder is removed or destroyed.
Randomised clinical trial (RCT):
a treatment research design that involves the random assignment of clients having specific problems to an experimental (therapy) group or to a control condition so as to draw sound causal conclusions about the therapy’s efficacy.
Resistance:
largely unconscious manoeuvres that protect clients from dealing with anxiety-arousing material in therapy.
Response prevention:
the prevention of escape or avoidance responses during exposure to an anxiety arousing conditioned stimulus so that extinction can occur.
Social skills training:
a technique in which a client learns more effective social behaviours by observing and imitating a skilful model.
Specificity question:
the ultimate question of psychotherapy research: “Which types of therapy administered by which kinds of therapists to which kinds of clients having which kinds of problems produce which kinds of effects?”
Stimulus hierarchy:
in systematic desensitisation, the creation of a series of anxiety arousing stimuli that are ranked in terms of the amount of anxiety they evoke.
Systematic desensitisation:
a procedure used to eliminate anxiety using counter-conditioning, in which a new response is incompatible with anxiety is conditioned to the anxiety-arousing conditioned stimulus.
Tardive Dyskinesia:
an irreversible motor disorder that can occur as a side effect of certain antipsychotic drugs.
Token economy:
a procedure in which desirable behaviours are reinforced with tokens or points that can later be redeemed for other reinforcers.
Transference:
the psychoanalytic phenomenon in which a client responds irrationally to the analyst as if the latter were an important person from the client’s past who plays a significant role in the client’s dynamics.
Unconditional positive regard:
a communicated attitude of total and unconditional acceptance of another person that conveys the person’s intrinsic worth.
Virtual reality (VR):
computer-produced virtual environments that immerse an individual and produce experiences similar to those of a corresponding real environment.
