Psychology · Ch 5 — Therapeutic Approaches
Key Terms
Key Terms
- Psychotherapy: A systematic, theory-based process using psychological methods to help a person overcome psychological distress or maladaptive behaviour.
- Insight-oriented therapies: Approaches (e.g., psychoanalysis) that aim to bring unconscious conflicts into conscious awareness, leading to self-understanding and change.
- Behaviour therapy: A set of techniques based on learning principles (classical and operant conditioning) to directly modify problematic behaviours.
- Systematic desensitisation: A behaviour therapy technique where a client is gradually exposed to an anxiety-provoking stimulus while practising relaxation, to extinguish the fear response.
- Aversion therapy: Pairing an undesirable behaviour (e.g., smoking) with an unpleasant stimulus (e.g., a mild electric shock) to create a conditioned aversion.
- Cognitive therapy: Focuses on identifying and changing irrational or distorted thought patterns (e.g., Beck’s cognitive therapy for depression).
- Rational Emotive Behaviour Therapy (REBT): Ellis’s approach that challenges irrational beliefs (e.g., “I must be perfect”) and replaces them with rational, adaptive ones.
- Client-centred therapy: Rogers’s humanistic approach emphasising unconditional positive regard, empathy, and genuineness to create a safe environment for self-growth.
- Gestalt therapy: A humanistic-existential therapy that focuses on the “here and now,” integrating fragmented parts of the self through techniques like the empty-chair dialogue.
- Biomedical therapy: Use of medications (e.g., antidepressants, antipsychotics) or other biological interventions (e.g., ECT) to treat psychological disorders. …