Psychotherapy
- Humanistic
- Behavioral
- Cognitive
Psychologists
Counsels
Psychiatrists
Prescribe drugs
Behavior Therapy
Goal: to modify specific problem behaviors
- Maladaptive behaviors learned
- insights may not get you to change behavior
Classical conditioning techniques
Counterconditioning: learning new response thats incompatible with old one
Pure form- bedwetting example:
Bedwetting if continues past a young age
Bell and Pad: bell connected to pad under sheets, when sheets feel wetness, bell bring and eventually kids learn to wakeup before bell rings and before urination
Systematic desensitization (exposure therapy)
Get a certain thing paired with relaxation
- Train people to relax (meditate)
- Create anxiety hierarchy (1-10 of anxiety)
- Apply to real life
Flooding
Putting someone through phobia- exposing them
ex: having them hold a spider
Averse conditioning
Not effective
Operant conditioning
Techniques
- Reinforce incompatible behavior
- Stop reinforcing problem behavior
- Reinforce non occurrence
- Remove opportunity for positive reinforcement
Token economies
Build up tokens, exchanging for points, coins, etc. for a reward later on
Cognitive Therapies
- Faulty thinking is the culprit
- Identify the faulty thinking and change it
Rational-emotive behavior therapy
Albert Ellis
- focus on irrational thinking
- problems explained by ABC model
ABC Model
Activating event:
“Jerry’s girlfriend doesn’t like me”
Beliefs (faulty thinking):
“Everyone must like me”
Consequence:
“I’m miserable what can I do o get her to like me?”
Rational-emotive behavior therapy (REBT)
Steps of therapy
(must, should)
-Identify irrational beliefs
-Dispute of challenge irrational beliefs
Confrontational type of therapy
-admit irrational beliefs an accept them as irrational
Cognitive Therapy (CT)
- Aaron Beck
- Similar focus as REBT
- more emphasis on “negative cognitive biases”
- “softer approach”
Steps in therapy
- Recognize automatic thoughts, beliefs, or biases
- Empirically test beliefs
- How is it different from REBT
- less confrontational
- Therapist allows patients to test their own beliefs
Cognitive biases associated with depression
Selective Thinking: focusing on a single negative detail
Overgeneralization: sweeping global conclusions based on isolated incidents
Magnification: overestimate impact of negative events and underestimate impact of positive events
Cognitive-behavioral therapy
Combination of the previous 2 techniques
Eclectic approach
Combines many techniques
50% of therapists
Evaluating Therapies
-Psychotherapy significantly more effective than “no treatment”
Yes- clients and therapies
No/maybe- meta analyses of outcomes
Depression
Cognitive therapy, behavioral therapy
Anxiety
Cognitive therapy, exposure therapy
Factors contributing to therapy effectiveness
- therapeutic relationship (catharsis)
- Therapist characteristics (empathy)
- client characteristics
- external circumstances
