| A | B |
|---|
| Psychotherapy | an emotionally charged, confiding interaction between a trained therapist and someone who suffers from psychological difficulties. |
| Biomedical therapy | prescribed medications or medical procedures that act directly on the patient’s nervous system. |
| Eclectic approach | an approach to psychotherapy that, depending on the client’s problems, uses techniques from various forms of therapy. |
| 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 regressed feelings. Allowing the patient to gain self-insight. |
| Resistance | in psychoanalysis, the blocking from consciousness of anxiety-laden material. |
| 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). |
| Client-centered therapy | a humanistic therapy; developed by Carl Rogers, in which the therapist uses techniques such as active listening within a genuine, accepting, emphatic environment to facilitate clients growth. |
| Active listening | empathic listening in which the listener echoes, restates, and clarifies. A feature of Rogers’ client-centered therapy. |
| Behavior therapy | therapy that applies learning principles to the elimination of unwanted behaviors. |
| Counterconditioning | a behavior therapy procedure that conditions new responses to stimuli that trigger unwanted behaviors; based on classical conditioning. Includes exposure therapy and aversive conditioning. |
| Exposure therapies | behavioral techniques, such as systematic desensitization, that treat anxieties by exposing people (in imagination or actuality) to the things they fear and avoid. |
| Systematic desensitization | a type of counterconditioning that associates a pleasant relaxed state with gradually increasing anxiety-triggering stimuli. Commonly used to treat phobias. |
| Virtual reality exposure therapy | An anxiety treatment that progressively exposes people to simulations of their greatest fears, such as airplane flying, spiders, or public speaking. |
| Aversive conditioning | a type of counterconditioning that associates an unpleasant state (such as nausea) with an unwanted behavior (such as drinking alcohol). |
| Token economy | an operant conditioning procedure in which people earn a token of some sort for exhibiting a desired behavior and can later exchange the tokens for various privileges or treats. |
| Cognitive therapy | therapy that teaches people new, more adaptive ways of thinking and acting, based on the assumption that thoughts intervene between events and our emotional reactions. |
| Cognitive behavior therapy | a popular integrated therapy that combines cognitive therapy (changing self-defeating thinking) with behavior therapy (changing behavior). |
| 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; attempts to guide family members toward positive relationships and improved communication. |
| Psychopharmacology | the study of the effects of drugs on mind and behavior. |
| Electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) | a biomedical therapy for severely depressed patients in which a brief electric current is sent through the brain of an anesthetized patient. |
| Repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) | the application of repeated pulses of magnetic energy to the brain; used to stimulate or suppress brain activity. |
| 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. The procedure cut the nerves that connect to the frontal lobes to the emotional-controlling centers of the inner brain. |
