01/31/14 Psychological Therapies

• Psychological therapist treatments that are based upon psychological principals.
• Biomedical therapies- treatments that focus on alternating the brain with drugs, psychosurgery, or electro-compulsive therapy.
• Therapy
• Used to be that if someone exhibited abnormal behaviors, they were institutionalized.
• Because of new drugs, and better therapy, the U.S. went to a policy of deinstitutionalized. 

1. Psychoanalysis
• Frued's therapy
• Freud used free association, hypnosis and dream interpretation to gain insight into the client's unconscious.
2. Humanistic Therapy
• Focuses on people's potential for self- fulfillment (self- actualization)
• Focus on the present and future (not the past)
• Focus on conscious thoughts (not unconscious ones). 
• Take responsibility for your actions- instead of blaming childhood anxieties.
• Group therapies- ex: alcoholic addiction
• Self-help support groups: family help. 
• Most widely used humanistic technique is: Client (Person) Centered Therapy developed by Carl Rogers
• Therapist should use genuineness, acceptance, and empathy to show unconditional positive regard towards their clients.
3. Behavior Therapy
• Therapy that applies learning principles to the elimination of unwanted behaviors. 
• The behaviors are the problems- so we must change the behaviors.

• Systematic Desensitization
• A type of counter conditioning that associates a pleasant relaxed state with gradually increasing anxiety- triggering stimuli.
• Exposure Therapy- form of desensitization where the client directly confronts the anxiety- triggering stimuli.
• Adversive Conditioning
• A type of counter-conditioning that associates an unpleasant state with an unwanted behavior. 
• Token Economy
• An operant conditioning procedure that rewards as desired behavior. 
• A patient exchanges a token of some sort, earned from exhibiting the desired behavior.

4. Cognitive Therapy

• A 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.