Psychotherapy
Any type of treatment for emotional and behavioral disorders that uses psychological rather than biological means.
Insight Therapies
Approaches to psychotherapy based on the notion that psychological well-being depends on self-understanding.
Psychodynamic Therapies
Psychotherapies that attempt to uncover childhood experiences that are thought to explain a patient's current difficulties.
Psychoanalysis
The first psychodynamic therapy, which was developed by Freud and uses free association, dream analysis, and transference.
Free Association
A psychoanalytic technique used to explore the unconscious by having patients reveal whatever thoughts, feelings, or images come to mind.
Transference
An emotional reaction that occurs during psychoanalysis, in which the patient displays feelings and attitudes toward the analyst that were present in another significant relationship.
Interpersonal Therapy (ITP)
A breif psychotherapy desidgned to help depressed people better understand and cope with problems relating to their interpersonal relationships.
Humanistic Therapies
Psychotherapies that assume that people have the ability and freedom to lead rational lives and make rational choices.
Person-Centered Therapy
A nondirective, humanisitic therapy developed by Carl Rogers, in chich the therapist creates an accepting climate and shows empathy, freeing clients to be themselves and releasing their natural tendence toward self-actualization.
Nondirective Therapy
Any type of psychotherapy in which the therapist allows the direction of the therapy sessions to be controlled by the client; an example is person-centered therapy.
Gestalt Therapy
A therapy that was orginated by Fritz Perls and that emphasizes the importance of clients' fully experiencing, in the present moment, their feelings, thoughts, and actions and then taking responsibility for them.
Directive Therapy
Any type of psychotherapy in which the therapist takes an active role in determining the course of therapy sessions and provides answers and suggestions to the patient; and example is Gestalt therapy.
Relationship Therapies
Therapies that attempt to improve patients' interpersonal relationships or create new relationships to support patients' efforts to address psychological problems.
Traditional Behavioral Couple Therapy (IBCT)
A type of couple therapy that emphasizes both behavior change and mutual acceptance.
Family Therapy
Therpy involving an entire family, with the goal of helping family members reach agreement on changes that will help heal the family unit, improve communication problems, and create more understand and harmony within the group.
Group Therapy
A form of therapy in which several clients (usually 7 to 10) meet regularaly with one or more therapists to resolve personal problems.
Behavior Therapy
An approach to therapy that uses learning principles to eliminate inappropriate or maladaptive behaviors and replace them with more adaptive responses.
Token Economy
A behavior modification techique that rewards appropriate behavior with tokens that can be exchanged later for desidred goods and/or privileges.
Time Out
A behavior modification technique used to eliminate undesirable behavior, especially in children and adolescents, by withdrawing all reinforcers for a period of time.
Systematic Desensitization
A behavior therapy that is based on classical conditioning and used to treat fears by training clients in deep musicle relaxation and then having them confront a graduated series of anxiety-producing situations (real or imagined) until they can remain relaxed while confronting even the most feared situations.
Flooding
A behavior therapy based on classical conditioning and used to treat phobias by exposing clients to the feared object (or asking them to imagine it vividly) for an extended period, until their anxiety decreases.
Exposure and Response Prevention
A behavior therapy that exposes patients with obsessive-compulsive disorder to stiumli that trigger obsessions and compulsive rituals, while patients resist performing the compulsive rituals for progressively longer periods of time.
Aversion Therapy
A behavior therapy in which an aversive stimulus is paired with a harmful or socially undesirable behavior until the behavior becomes associated with pain or discomfort.
Participant Modeling
A behavior therapy in which an appropriate response to a feared stimulus is modeled in graduated steps and the client attempts to imitate the model step by step, encouraged and supported by the therapist.
Cognitive Therapies
Therapies that assume maladaptive behavior can result from irrational thoughts, beliefs, and ideas.
Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy
A directive form of psychotherapy, developed by Albert Ellis and designed to challange clients' irrational beliefs about themselves and others.
Cognitive Therapy
A therapy designed b Aaron Beck to help patients stop their negative thoughts as they occur and replace them with more objective thoughts.
Biological Therapy
A therapy that is based on the assumption that psychological disorders are symptomsof underlying physical problems.
Antipsychotic Drugs
Drugs used to control severe psychotic syptoms, such as delusions, hallucinations, disorganized speech, and disorganized behavior, by inhibiting dopamine activity; also known as neuroleptics.
Antidepressant Drugs
Drugs that act as mood elevators for severely depressed people and are also prescribed to treat some anxiety disorders.
Lithium
A drug used to treat bipolar disorder, which at proper maintenance dosage reduces both manic and depressive episodes.
Electroconvulsive Therapy (ECT)
A biological therapy in which and electric current is passed through the right hempisphere of the brain; usually resereved for severely depressed patients who are suicidal.
Psychosurgery
Brain surgery performed to alleviate serious psychological disorders or unbearable chronic pain.
Psychologist
A mental health professional who possesses a doctoral degree in psychology.
Psychiatrist
A mental health professional who is a medical doctor.
Culturally Sensitive Therapy
An appraoch to therapy in which knowledge of clients' cultural backgrouns guides the choice of therapeutic interventions.
Gender-Sensitive Therapy
An appraoch to therapy that takes into account the effects of gender on both the therapist's and the client's behavior.