Unit 13

Psychotherapy – Treatment involving psychological techniques to help someone overcome difficulties or achieve personal growth.

Biomedical therapy – The use of medications or medical procedures to treat psychological disorders.

Eclectic approach – A blend of different therapeutic techniques based on the client’s needs.

Psychoanalysis – Freud's therapeutic technique that aims to release repressed emotions by exploring unconscious thoughts.

Resistance – In psychoanalysis, a client's blocking of anxiety-provoking thoughts from consciousness.

Interpretation – The analyst’s explanation of dreams, resistance, or behaviors to promote insight.

Transference – The patient’s transfer of emotions linked with other relationships (e.g., love or anger) onto the therapist.

Psychodynamic therapy – A modern version of psychoanalysis focusing on unconscious processes and current relationships.

Insight therapy – Therapies that aim to increase a person’s awareness of underlying motives and defenses.

Carl Rogers – Humanistic psychologist who developed client-centered therapy.

Client-centered therapy – A humanistic therapy where the therapist uses techniques like active listening and unconditional positive regard to foster growth.

Active listening – Empathic listening where the listener echoes, restates, and clarifies the speaker.

Unconditional Positive Regard – An accepting, nonjudgmental attitude which Carl Rogers believed fosters self-awareness and self-acceptance.

Behavior therapy – Therapy that applies learning principles to eliminate unwanted behaviors.

Counterconditioning – A behavior therapy that uses classical conditioning to create new responses to stimuli that trigger unwanted behaviors.

Exposure therapies – Behavioral techniques that expose people to their fears in a safe environment to help them overcome them.

Mary Cover Jones – Pioneer of behavior therapy; developed exposure-based methods.

Systematic desensitization – A type of exposure therapy that associates a relaxed state with gradually increasing anxiety-triggering stimuli.

Joseph Wolpe – Refined Mary Cover Jones’s work and developed systematic desensitization.

Virtual reality exposure therapy – Uses simulations to expose patients safely to feared situations.

Aversive conditioning – A therapy that associates an unpleasant state with an unwanted behavior.

B.F. Skinner – Behaviorist who applied operant conditioning principles to therapy.

Token economy – A behavior therapy where desired behaviors are reinforced with tokens that can be exchanged for rewards.

Cognitive therapy – Therapy that teaches people new, more adaptive ways of thinking.

Rational-emotive behavior therapy – A confrontational cognitive therapy developed by Albert Ellis that challenges irrational beliefs.

Albert Ellis – Psychologist who developed Rational-emotive behavior therapy.

Aaron Beck – Developed a gentler cognitive therapy for depression that helps clients identify and challenge distorted thinking.

Cognitive-behavior therapy – A therapy combining cognitive and behavioral techniques to change thinking and behavior patterns.

Group therapy – Therapy conducted with groups rather than individuals, allowing benefits from group interaction.

Family therapy – Therapy that treats the family as a system; views an individual's unwanted behaviors as influenced by or directed at other family members.

Regression toward the mean – The tendency for extreme emotions or behaviors to return to normal over time.

Meta-analysis – A statistical technique for combining the results of multiple studies to determine overall trends.

Evidence-based practice – Clinical decision-making that integrates the best research with clinical expertise and patient preferences.

Therapeutic alliance – The bond of trust and mutual understanding between therapist and client.

Resilience – The ability to cope with stress and bounce back from adversity or trauma.

Psychopharmacology – The study of how drugs affect mood, perception, and behavior.

Antipsychotic drugs – Medications used to treat symptoms of schizophrenia and other psychotic disorders.

Antianxiety drugs – Medications that reduce anxiety by depressing central nervous system activity.

Antidepressant drugs – Medications used to treat depression, anxiety disorders, OCD, and PTSD.

Electroconvulsive therapy – A biomedical therapy for severely depressed patients that involves electric current passed through the brain.

Repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation – A noninvasive treatment that uses magnetic fields to stimulate brain regions associated with depression.

Psychosurgery – Surgery that removes or destroys brain tissue in an effort to change behavior.

Lobotomy – A now-rare psychosurgical procedure once used to calm uncontrollably emotional or violent patients by severing connections in the frontal lobe.