Psychotherapy Flashcards
Psychoanalysis (PA)
Goal to help patients achieve insight- the conscious awareness of their problems.
Awareness allows patients to adjust their behaviour to current life situations instead of repeating maladaptive routines.
Deals with buried emotions.
Free association. (PA)
Clients verbally report feelings, thoughts or images that enter awareness, without censorship.
Freud believes it gives clues to unconscious mind that provides info on important themes of issues
Dream interpretation (PA)
Dreams express impulses, fantasies, wishes that are kept hidden in the unconscious
Transference (PA)
When the client responds irrationally to the analyst as if they were an important figure from the clients past. Either neg or positive.
Interpretation (PA)
A subtle statement made by the therapist that is intended to provide the client with insight into their behaviour. Needs to be about info near the clients current awareness. Before the therapy can be ended the client must arrive at insights and translate them into behaviour changes
Negatives of PA
Expensive and time consuming. Clients seen 5 times a week for 5 years.
Psychodynamic therapies
Similar to PA but use a more focused method to make process less expensive and time consuming. Conservation takes place instead of free association. Goal is to help client deal with specific life problem instead of rebuilding personality. May involve teaching the client interpersonal and emotion control skills.
Interpersonal therapy
Focuses on the clients current relationships with important people in their life. 15-20 sessions required. Goals are to resolve things like marital conflict, adjusting to loss, correcting problems with social skills to make it easier for the client to maintain a successful relationship. Links current relationship issues with issues from the past. Effective for depression
Humanistic Psychotherapies
Believe humans are capable of consciously controlling their actions and taking responsibility for their choices and behaviour.
Inner resource for self healing and personal growth and disordered behaviour reflects a blocking of natural growth processes because of distorted perceptions, lack of awareness and neg self image.
Goal is to create an environment for self exploration and remove barriers from neg childhood experiences.
Client Centered Therapy (humanistic)
Developed by Carl Rodgers.
Believes in self exploration, personal growth, importance of the relationship between client and therapist.
Unconditional positive regard, empathy, and genuineness.
Client feels accepted and free to grow. Show increased self awareness, self acceptance, self reliance, and improved life functioning.
Gestalt Therapy (humanistic)
Bringing difficulties into immediate awareness so client can be whole again.
Carried out in groups, very dynamic and confrontational.
Aims to help people get in touch with their inner selves.
Can involve role play-evokes powerful feeling and makes client aware of unresolved issue that affect their lives.
Cognitive therapies
Help clients discover and chance the cognition a that underlie their problems. Do not emphasise unconscious psychodynamic processes.
Ellis’s rational emotive therapy (cognitive)
Albert Ellis believed irrational thought was the cause of self defeating emotions.
A- activating event that triggers the emotion.
B- belief system that underlies the way in which a person appraises the event.
C- emotional and behavioural consequences of that appraisal
D- disputing (challenging) belief system that is key to maladaptive behaviour.
Clients given homework to analyse and change self statements.
Learn and practice cognitive coping responses
Beck’s Cognitive Therapy (cognitive)
Goal is to point out errors in thinking and logic that underlie emotional disturbances and help clients identify their thought patterns.
Helps clients realise their thoughts, not their situation causes maladaptive emotional reactions.
Applied in depression, anxiety, compulsive disorders and personality disorders. Useful for depression when combined with drugs.
Behaviour therapies
Belief that inner dynamics are unimportant and problem behaviours can be unlearned by applying principles of classical conditioning, operant conditioning and modelling.
Classical conditioning
Procedures that have been used to reduce anxiety responses and condition aversive emotional responses to a stimuli.
Exposure: an extinction approach (behaviour)
Use of classical extinction through exposure to the feared conditioned stimulus while using response prevention to stop the operant avoidance response from occurring.
Stimuli will evoke anxiety but the anxiety will be extinguished over time if the person remains in the presence of the CS and the UCS doesn’t occur.
Some believe this worsens the problem.
Psychodynamic therapies
Roots lie in Freud’s psychoanalytic theory. Focus on internal conflicts and unconscious factors that underlie maladaptive behaviour.
Systematic Desensitization: A Counter Conditioning Approach (behavioural)
- train client in voluntary muscle relaxation.
- construct a stimulus hierarchy arranged in scenes from low anxiety to high anxiety and the client is then told to imagine the first scene in the hierarchy while the therapist deeply relaxes them. When the low arousal scenes have been deconditioned and the client feels less anxious about the situation, they move up the hierarchy
Aversion Therapy (behaviour)
goal is to condition anxiety for a stimulus that triggers deviant behaviour.
a stimulus that is attractive to the client (eg. alcohol as the CS) is paired with a noxious UCS (eg. injection that causes nausea).
results variable
Operant Conditioning Treatments
techniques that apply operant conditioning procedures in an attempt to increase or decrease a specific behaviour. The focus is on observable behaviours that are measured throughout the treatment programme.
Positive Reinforcement techniques (operant conditioning)
strengthening behaviours through the application of positive reinforcement.
people are given tokens when they perform desired behaviours and when they collect a certain number of tokens they can redeem tangible reinforcers. The tokens can eventually be phased out and the desired behaviour will continue. This is highly effective with some of the most challenging populations (such as schizophrenics.
Therapeutic Application of Punishment (operant conditioning)
punishment is used as a last resort to get rid of severely harmful behaviour.
Modelling and social skills training (operant conditioning)
modelling- effective and nb learning process in humans and can be used to treat some behavioural problems
social skills training- clients learn new skills my observing and imitating a model that is socially adept.
