PSYC 508 Flashcards
1st and 2nd Order Cybernetics
What: 2nd order cybernetics refers to the counselor no longer being an expert-observer but now participant observers. 1st order change involves addressing symptoms and the counselor observing the system from the outside and beginning to understand the dynamic of the family (expert observer). Cybernetics = mechanical system theory that focuses on regulating feedback mechanisms.
Where: Family systems therapy, derived from mechanical systems theory
When: 1st order is used in the beginning of therapy to observe interactions, and 2nd order is used later on in the therapy to help guide the treatment process when the therapist becomes part of the family system
Why: It’s important in understanding family dynamics; it is impossible to understand an individual’s behavior without understanding the context in which it occurs within the family.
EX: Lucy the therapist watches a family interact in order to understand their patterns. She then proceeds to talk with the family about what she thinks the problem is with their dynamic; this is 1st order cybernetic change.
Adlerian Therapy
What: Direct educational strategies to enhance client awareness of issues and that they exist. Principles: people are purposeful, behavior is purposeful, social interest, completeness, phenomenology (consciousness is subjective and unique to each person). He emphasized striving for superiority, in a social interest lens to uplift the community not self-interest because he believed that establishing and maintaining healthy relationships was a goal for all in therapy.
Who: Alfred Adler
When: The tasks of life that bring most people into therapy are work, social relationships, love/marriage, self, spirituality, and parenting/family (according to Adler)
Why: Helps us to understand how life is intertwined with pathology. This approach helps to emphasize psycho education which is a great way to teach a patient about their disorder and how their life/environment is involved
EX: Taylor is depressed and socially isolating herself, a therapist with an Adlerian orient would say that contributing to society and connecting with others will be extremely helpful to her problems.
Automatic Thoughts
What: Thoughts that are instantaneous, habitual, and nonconscious. They affect a person’s mood and actions; arise from environmental stimuli spontaneously or reflexively
Where: Aaron Beck
When: Arise from faulty assumptions and rooted in core beliefs/schema; useful in recognizing them when these thoughts are negative
Why: Helping individuals to become aware of the presence and impact of negative, automatic thoughts and then to test their validity is a central task of cognitive therapy.
EX: Caroline keeps saying she is “not good enough” to apply for a masters program. This is an automatic thought that can be targeted through Socratic dialogue to find the evidence of that.
Behavioral Activation
What: originally activity-scheduling. Involves working with clients to schedule activities that increase positive, reinforcing events. Operant conditioning-schedule activities that increase the rate of naturally occurring positive reinforcement. Positive/negative reinforcement.
Where: behavioral therapy/operant conditioning
When: It identifies a client’s avoidance behaviors and reinforcers.
Why: It is an important evidenced based intervention for depressive disorders
EX: Tara is depressed and a goal during therapy is to engage in activities she enjoys again. Using behavioral activation, she will create a schedule with her therapist to go out to dinner with her friends once a week.
Behavioral Therapy
What: Type of psychotherapy that uses principles of “learning and conditioning” (classical/operant) to reduce maladaptive behaviors and increase adaptive behaviors. You must clarify the client’s problem, formulate initial goals for therapy, identify target behavior, design a treatment plan, and evaluate the success of the treatment plan
Who: Watson (little albert), Skinner (operant conditioning), Pavlov (dogs, classical conditioning)
When: Trying to change overt behaviors that are maintaining certain maladaptive behaviors/problems.
Why: To understand the importance of behavior and the strong impact it has on pathology, case conceptualization, and treatment
EX: Francis is doing behavior therapy to fix her agoraphobia. She uses reinforcement and exposure therapy to combat the agoraphobia. These are parts of behavior therapy.
Big Five Personality Model/Traits
What: There are five personality dimensions that constantly arose throughout studies like factor analysis, these are, openness, conscientiousness, agreeableness, extraversion, and neuroticism. These traits are assumed to be biologically based and are typically stable in adults.
Where: personality and traits theory, trait dispositional theory
Who: everyone ever
Why: Some traits can be exasperated by psychological illnesses and therapy can teach skills or manage stress associated with personality dimensions. Knowing where a client falls on the continuum can influence interventions.
EX: Laura exhibits high levels of neuroticism after taking the NEO-PI during an intake and after further assessment the therapist realsies Laura also shows signs of a possible bipolar disorder. Her big five personality traits correlate with her psychological symptoms.
Client-centered/Person-centered Theory/Therapy
What: A radical, new approach to therapy advocating respectful listening and an authentic counselor-client connection. The conditions of therapy include therapists’ attitude of congruence (warmth), unconditional positive regard (genuineness), empathic understanding (empathy). Psychopathology is categorized by failure of the self to learn from experience.
Where: humanistic approach
Who: Carl Rogers
When: The therapeutic relationship is the mechanism of change in this type of therapy that includes trusting the client. The relationship allows clients to engage in natural self-discovery and personal growth instead of educating clients, interpreting their behaviors, or identifying faulty thoughts
Why: This is important because PCT core conditions are at the heart of every therapy and have been researched and proven to be driving factors of positive therapeutic outcomes.
EX: Trisha is a person-centered therapist. Her sessions are wide ranging and client driven. She provides continual empathic feedback and an environment that encourages her clients to be their authentic selves. She asks questions to help her clients come to their own conclusions.
Cognitive Therapy
What: A form of psychotherapy based on the concept that emotional and behavioral problems in an individual are the result of maladaptive ways of thinking and distorted attitudes towards oneself or others.
Who: Aaron Beck
When: The objective is to identify these faulty cognitions and replace them with more adaptive ones (cognitive restructuring).
Why: Emphasizes the importance of our mind, thoughts, and feelings when it comes to pathology. Understanding how someone thinks will help therapists better conceptualize patients and possible treatment outcomes.
EX: A client comes into therapy with depression and the therapist finds out that she has schemas of not being good enough because her father told her she never lived up to his expectations. Using cognitive restructuring the therapist will target these core beliefs.
The therapist takes the role of an active guide who attempts to make the client aware of these distorted thinking patterns and who helps the client correct and revise their perceptions and attitudes by citing evidence to the contrary or by eliciting it from the client.
Common Factors in Psychotherapy
What: These are elements that exist across a wide range of different therapy approaches. Some researchers believe these are the primary reason why psychotherapy works. There are four categories of common factors, extratherapeutic, therapy relationship, expectation, and specific techniques. These include, a culturally appropriate explanation for client distress, a healing setting, a bond between client and therapist, emotional expression, exposure to feared stimuli, feedback from therapist, insight into one’s problems, positive expectations, working alliance, therapist credibility or expertise and trust in the therapist. Extratherapeutic factors include client factors such as severity of disturbance, motivation, capacity to relate to others, ego strength, psychological-mindedness, the ability to identify a single problem to work on in counseling and sources of help and support within the environment.
extra-therapeutic factors - client factors such as motivation, support within environment
therapeutic alliance - rapport and positive working relationship between therapist and client,
expectation - hope for positive outcomes
Why: These are important because they can determine therapeutic outcomes and should be identified early on in therapy.
EX: In treating a client with depression, there are multiple treatment interventions that can work. In looking further at client factors, you decide that behavioral activation is the best way to go.
Conditional vs Unconditional Positive Regard
What: CPR: an attitude of acceptance and esteem that others express toward an individual on a conditional basis, that is, depending on the acceptability of the individual’s behavior in accordance with the others’ personal standards. UPR: an attitude of caring, acceptance, and prizing that others express toward an individual irrespective of their behavior and without regard to the others’ personal standards.
Where: person centered theory maintains that therapists must show unconditional positive regard for their clients
Who: Carl Rogers
Why: According to Rogers, UPR is considered conducive to the individual’s self-awareness, self-worth, and personality growth; a universal human need essential to healthy development. Shows the client that therapy is a process in which you can trust your therapist because they are showing you acceptance.
EX: In a session, a client expresses attitudes toward his partner that the therapist finds personally repulsive. She maintains an open and accepting posture towards her client despite her personal feelings because she believes unconditional positive regard is key to the therapeutic relationship
Conditions of Worth
What: The standards children and adults believe they must meet to be acceptable and worthy of love.The state in which an individual considers love and respect to be conditional on meeting the approval of others.
Who: Carl Rogers.
When: This belief derives from the child’s sense of being worthy of love on the basis of parental approval: As the individual matures, they may continue to feel worthy of affection and respect only when expressing desirable behaviors.
Why: Over time, this leads these individuals to an external locus of evaluation. Those appraisals are internalized and can lead to incongruence with a person’s own values, which ultimately leads to distress/psychopathology
EX: If Taylor doesn’t get all A’s on her report card her mom won’t speak to her for a few days. This leads to negative conditions of worth for Taylor.
Countertransference
What: The bias that occurs in therapy when the therapist projects their past feelings or attitudes about something in their own lives onto the client, thereby distorting the way they perceive and react to the client and contributing to bias.
Where: psychoanalytic theory
Who: Freud
Why: It is important for the therapist to be aware of countertransference because it leads to confusing and/or harmful reactions in therapy
EX: A therapist is seeing a client who got cheated on. The therapist was cheated on in a very similar scenario recently, she is finding she is biased to the situation and expressing more empathy than usual.
Cultural Self-Awareness
What: This is part of multicultural competencies in therapy and is defined as awareness of cultural background and biases
Why: This is important in therapy because the counselor needs to be aware of their values and beliefs for a successful therapeutic relationship and this requires self-reflection to understand these biases.
EX: Carl is a white male therapist who grew up in a middle class family. When he works with clients who have different cultural identities, be they racial, socioeconomic, or sexuality differences, he takes care to be aware of his own blind spots and biases based on his different cultural life experience.
Defense Mechanisms
What: Automatic and they are designed to ward off unpleasant anxiety feelings associated with internal conflicts among the id, superego, and reality. The four primary characteristics are automatic, unconscious, ward off unacceptable impulses, and distort reality. Examples: repression, denial, projection, reaction formation, displacement, rationalization, regression, sublimation. The ego uses these to deal with anxiety linked to internal battles
Where: psychoanalytic
Who: Freud
Why: defense mechanisms can say a lot about a person and how they view the world and their choices. This information can help us to determine treatment planning, and pathology
EX: Kevin tends to take his anger out on his wife and uses her as an emotional punching bag, he is using the defense mechanism of projection to put his frustrations of his boss angering him on wife
Externalizing Conversations
What: This is a specific technique used in narrative therapy to push problems outside the intrapsychic realm.
Where: narrative therapy
When: Through problem externalizations clients can dissociate from problems, look at them from greater distances and develop strategies for eliminating them
Why: helps clients who are distressed because they blame themselves for problems or pain they are experiencing. Doing this can help lift the burden and create self awareness
EX: Tony is in treatment for a heroin addiction. He has been in treatment before and feels somewhat helpless in the face of the addiction. His therapist steers him towards an externalizing conversation with the question, “How long have you been working against this opiate problem?”
Factor Analysis
What: the mathematical procedure that helps to sort test responses into relatively homogenous clusters of items that are highly correlated. This is used to categorize data extracted from self-report measures of personality traits to allow for identification of underlying traits. Used to make ‘big five’ structures.
Where: trait and dispositional theory
When: The factors obtained are simply names given to the correlations found among the particular measures. It essentially identifies patterns but does not attribute to causation and explanation of human behavior
Why: generally important for research
EX: Factor analysis was done in the research leading up to the Big 5 Personality model. It examined correlations between 1700 different descriptive words typically used to describe personality and narrowed them down to 5 identifiable factors.
Fixation
What: the persistence of an early stage of psychosexual development or the inappropriate attachment to an early psychosexual object or mode of gratification, such as anal or oral activity; this fixation limits the person’s ability to negotiate the tasks of later psychosexual stages.
Where: psychoanalytic theory
When: a child develops an inappropriate attachment to an early psychosexual object or mode of gratification. This will limit a person’s ability to negotiate the tasks of later stages
Why: It is important because this can affect later functioning and potentially lead to psychopathology in adult life.
EX: A client comes into therapy with an addiction to smoking, according to Freud’s psychosexual stages. This client was either overgratified or withholding during the oral stage.
Gemeinschaftsgefühl or social interest
What: social interest or community spirit: a spirit of equality, belonging, and unity. . It is believed that establishing and maintaining healthy social relationships was an ultimate therapy goal, and that humans are naturally interdependent. It allows people to work together as equals to better themselves as individuals and as a community.
Where: adlerian therapy
Who: adler - he encouraged his clients to behave with social interest as it is positively related to spirituality, positive psychology, and health, and inversely related to anger, depression, and anxiety.
Why: This is important to understand because it promotes social activity, which is positively reinforcing to the client and encourages psychosocial healing by including the client’s social support in the therapeutic process.
EX: A client comes into therapy feeling depressed, according to Adlerian therapy investing time in fostering connections with others, will help the client to improve their well-being.
Genogram
What: individual histories of illness and death—but also incorporates aspects of the interpersonal relationships between family members. schematic diagram; tool for teaching family members about relationship dynamics in their system. Similar to family trees. Key to psychological health is differentiation from family members
Where: family system theory
Who: bowen
When: This allows new ways to think about the family structure and emergence of a more emotionally regulated and differentiated structure
Why: knowing history is essential to knowing the client. Biological or environmental factors can play a role in pathology and treatment planning. Family can help reveal behaviors that are being passed down that can be maladaptive.
EX: During family therapy, the Johnsons create a genogram and find out that addiction is being passed down on the fathers side of the family.
Multicultural Counseling
What: not a specific theory but one that should be used across all other theories and involves appreciating and validating diverse perspectives. It says all cultures have positive and enriching dimensions. MCC therapist possesses cultural self awareness, cultural knowledge, and culture specific expertise (skills) appreciating and evaluating diverse perspectives.
Where: discussed in counseling and personality theories as part of good practice in counseling
When: This modality will help clients define goals consistent with their life experiences and cultural values
Why: an essential part of becoming a counselor because it allows us to look at the patient from more than one viewpoint. Assessing culture can help us see the entire picture of the client’s problem. It is an ethical approach to treating clients.
EX: When assessing a client who seems to have anxiety, the therapist uses the ADDRESSING model to find out the multicultural aspects of the client that could be adding to the anxiety
Neo-Freudian
What: This was an extension of Freud’s ideas with an emphasis on social and cultural factors and how they affect personality development. An approach that derives from the classical psychoanalysis of Sigmund Freud but with modifications and revisions that typically emphasize social and interpersonal elements over biological instincts. de-emphasizes sex and emphasizes culture
Who: Karen Horney (Horney was the first to focus on women and the existing power differential and how it contributes to mental health) and Alfred Adler are considered neo-freudian; Horney provided a lot more feminist views to Freud’s work and de-emphasized sex.
Why: This is a more realistic approach to use with clients today
EX: Jennifer is a neo-Freudian therapist. She strives to cultivate warmth with her clients, and considers their present relationships an important piece of their psychological health. She also asks a lot of questions about childhood, and attempts to help them make the unconscious conscious.
Narrative Therapy
What: Treatment for individuals, couples, or families that helps them reinterpret and rewrite their life events into true but more life-enhancing narratives or stories. Diagnosing is unhelpful, psychoeducation is not emphasized, constant collaboration, and emphasizing client strengths is important. Questioning is the primary tool that therapists use to understand the story and then there are specific techniques used to help the client rewrite their story.
Who: Narrative therapy posits that individuals are primarily meaning-making beings who are the linguistic authors of their lives and who can reauthor their life stories by learning to deconstruct them, by seeing patterns in their ways of interpreting life events or problems, and by reconstruing problems or events in a more helpful light
Why: help with traumas, PTSD, etc. for clients to take control over their life/situation. This is a respectful approach that empowers clients to be experts in their own lives, and helps separate the person from the problem. Clients can break free from internalized social, cultural, and political oppression and rewrite their life stories with more adaptive themes.
EX: If Tom were to come in saying “I have anxiety, so I am a loser” Narrative therapy would reword that to “The anxiety tricks me into thinking I am a loser”
Person-situation Debate
What: a debate between personality theorists about what is most important for determining a person’s behavior - the person/traits of the person, or situation (environment). Traits are superior in predicting general behavior patterns, whereas situations are better at predicting specific behaviors.
Where: personality/trait theory
Why: It is important in assessment and conceptualization to understand how antecedents can predict future behavior.
EX: Tara is a therapist that strongly believes in the person side of the person situation debate in psychology. She believes that all traits are consistent across situations. Because of this, she administers the NEO-PI to all of her clients. Tara feels that she is better able to understand and predict her clients behavior because the assessment points out key personality traits.
Potentially Harmful Treatments
What: treatment where harm lies in either the nature of the intervention or in the improper application of the intervention. Treatments that have been systematically reviewed and their outcomes identified that these techniques produce unacceptable negative effects. In order for a therapy to be a PHT it has to have at least one of the following, a replicated RCT showing potential harm, meta-analytic reviews of multiple RCT’s and research reports linking sudden adverse events to the initiation of therapy
Where: ethical practice and efficacy research/counseling personality theories
When: They demonstrated harmful psychological or physical effects in clients or others, the harmful effects are enduring, and the harmful effects replicated by independent teams. A treatment where harm lies in either the nature of the intervention or in the improper application of the intervention.
Why: Know what treatments to avoid because they have harmful and damaging effects on the client. Therapists need to constantly stay up to date on current therapies
EX: Parents find out their kid is gay and take them to conversion therapy to turn them straight. This is a potential harmful therapy as it can cause more harm than good to the client
