PSYC 1101 Lecture Notes - John Cade, Weight Gain, Eye Movement Desensitization And Reprocessing
6 Jun 2018
School
Department
Course
Professor
Emily Melsky
AP Psych
10 April, 2017
Notes on Therapy
Introduction to Therapy and the Psychological Therapies
Treating Psychological Disorders
● Philippe Pinel and DOrothea Dix pushed for gentler and more humane treatment
● 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 a
person’s physiology
● Eclectic approach → an approach to psychotherapy that uses techniques from various
forms of therapy
Psychoanalysis and Psychodynamic Therapies
● Psychoanalysis → Sigmund Freud’s therapeutic technique. Freud believed the
patient's free associations, resistances, dreams, and transferences - and the therapist’s
interpretations of them - released previously repressed feelings, allowing the patient
to gain self-insight
Goals
● Release energy previously devoted to id-ego-superego conflicts
● Bring repressed feelings into conscious awareness
● Reduce growth-impeding inner conflicts
Techniques
● Emphasizes power of childhood experiences
● Free association - say whatever comes to mind
● Resistance → in psychoanalysis, the blocking from consciousness of anxiety-laden
material
● Note resistances and provide insight into their meaning
● Interpretation → in psychoanalysis, the analyst’s noting supposed dream meanings,
resistances, and other significant behaviors and events in order to promote insight
● Transference → in psychoanalysis, the patient's transfer to the analyst of emotions
linked with other relationships (such as love or hatred for a parent)
● Psychoanalysis relatively uncommon
Psychodynamic Therapy
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● Psychodynamic Therapy → therapy deriving from the psychoanalytic tradition;
views individuals as responding to unconscious forces and childhood experiences,
and seeks to enhance self-insight
● Focus on relationships and childhood experiences
● Meet with therapist face-to-face
● Explore defended-against thoughts and feelings
● Reveal past relationships as the origin of current difficulties
● Interpersonal psychology - effectively treated depression
Humanistic Therapies
● Emphasize potential for self-fulfillment
● Insight therapies → a variety of therapies that aim to improve psychological
functioning by increasing a person’s awareness of underlying motives and defenses
● Boost self-fulfillment
● Promote growth, not cure illness
● Responsibility for one’s feelings and actions
● Conscious thoughts more important than unconscious
● Present and future more important than past
● Client-centered therapy → a humanistic therapy, developed by Carl Rogers, in
which the therapist uses techniques such as active listening within a genuine,
accepting, empathic environment to facilitate a client’s growth. (Also called person-
centered therapy)
● Encouraged therapists to be more genuine
● Active listening → empathetic listening in which the listener echoes, restates, and
clarifies. A feature of Rogers’ client-centered therapy
● Unconditional positive regard → a caring, accepting, nonjudgmental attitude, which
Carl Rogers believed would help clients develop self-awareness and self-acceptance.
● To help with active listening:
○ Paraphrase
○ Invite clarification -questions
○ Reflect feelings - “it sounds frustrating”
Behavior Therapies
● Behavior therapies → therapy that applies learning principles to the elimination of
unwanted behaviors
● Doubt healing power of self-awareness
● Look at maladaptive behaviors as learned behaviors and replace them with constructive
behaviors
Classical Conditioning Techniques
● Maladaptive symptoms possibly examples of conditioned responses
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find more resources at oneclass.com
● Use conditioning to get rid of phobias and other maladaptive symptoms
● Counterconditioning → behavior therapy procedures that use classical conditioning
to evoke new responses to stimuli that are triggering of unwanted behaviors; include
exposure therapies and aversive conditioning
Exposure Therapies
● Associate something that causes fear with something pleasant - Mary Cover Jones
● This type of therapy was not accepted right away
● Exposure therapies → behavioral techniques, such as systematic desensitization and
virtual reality exposure therapy, that treat anxieties by exposing people (in
imagination or actual situations) to the things they fear and avoid
● Systematic desensitization → a type of exposure therapy that associates a pleasant
relaxed state with gradually increasing anxiety-triggering stimuli. Commonly used to
treat phobias
● Wolpe
● Progressive relaxation - train person to relax one muscle group after another until achieve
blissful state, then ask to imagine mildly anxiety-producing situation
● Used relax state to desensitize to increasingly anxious situations
● Virtual reality exposure therapy → an anxiety treatment that progressively exposes
people to electronic simulations of their greatest fears, such as airplane flying, spiders,
or public speaking
● Middle ground to actual recreation and imagination
Aversive Conditioning
● Aversive conditioning → a type of counterconditioning that associates an unpleasant
state (such as nausea) with an unwanted behavior (such as drinking alcohol)
● E.g. paint nails with gross-tasting polish to prevent nail biting
● Might work in the short run, not necessarily long
● In therapy, cognition influences conditioning - people know that the unpleasant thing
associated with the habit only occurs at the therapist
Operant Conditioning
● Behavior modification - reinforce desired behaviors but not undesired ones
● Some such programs are very intensive
● Positively reinforce desired behaviors and ignore or punish aggressive ones
● Works differently for different people
● Some become so reliant on rewards that the good behavior stops after treatment
● Token economy → an operant conditioning procedure in which people earn a token
of some some sort for exhibiting a desired behavior and can later exchange their
tokens for various privileges or treats
find more resources at oneclass.com
find more resources at oneclass.com
Document Summary
Philippe pinel and dorothea dix pushed for gentler and more humane treatment. 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 a person"s physiology. Eclectic approach an approach to psychotherapy that uses techniques from various forms of therapy. Freud believed the patient"s free associations, resistances, dreams, and transferences - and the therapist"s interpretations of them - released previously repressed feelings, allowing the patient to gain self-insight. Release energy previously devoted to id-ego-superego conflicts. Free association - say whatever comes to mind. Resistance in psychoanalysis, the blocking from consciousness of anxiety-laden material. Note resistances and provide insight into their meaning. Interpretation in psychoanalysis, the analyst"s noting supposed dream meanings, resistances, and other significant behaviors and events in order to promote insight.
