Download 1 Behavior and Cognitive Therapies

Behavior and Cognitive
Therapies
Bob Newhart Therapist "Stop it!"
AP Psychology
Behavior Therapies
Behavior Therapies
• View psychological disorders
as learned behaviors to be
fixed by learning new
behaviors (not searching for
underlying causes)
• Based upon Behaviorist and
Social-Cognitive approaches
to personality/disorder
Systematic Desensitization
• Developed by Joseph Wolpe (1958) to
help patients overcome phobias and
other forms of anxiety
• Client visualizes a series of anxietyprovoking stimuli while remaining
relaxed
1. Teach “progressive relaxation
training” procedures
2. Create a “desensitization hierarchy”
(series of increasingly fear provoking
situations)
Systematic Desensitization
3. Move up hierarchy when can tolerate
visualizing a situation without distress
(now often involves real-life or virtual
reality exposure)
4. Gradually weakens learned
association between anxiety & feared
object
Exposure Techniques
• “Flooding”
– Based on extinction
– Keeps people in feared
(but harmless) situation
and prevents them from
normally rewarding
pattern of escape
– Association between
feared stimulus and fear
response gradually
weakens
Behavior Therapies
• Modeling
– Client watches therapist or others perform
desirable behaviors – learn vicariously
• May be combined with gradual practice for
client
• Aversive Conditioning
– Uses classical conditioning to create a negative
response to a stimulus
• i.e. – nausea or shock with undesirable
actions, thoughts, situations (drinking,
smoking, etc.)
Behavior Therapies
• Positive reinforcements
– Set up contingencies (rules) that specify
behaviors to be strengthened through
reinforcement
• Has shown success with children with
Autism
– “Token Economy”
• System for improving behavior of
institutionalized clients - desirable
behaviors are rewarded with tokens
Cognitive Therapies
Cognitive Therapies
Rational-Emotive Behavior Therapy
(REBT)
– Albert Ellis
• Assumes psychological problems
like anxiety, guilt, depression are
caused by how people think about
events (not the events
themselves)
• Aims to identify and change selfdefeating thoughts
–(i.e. “shoulds” and “musts”)
Cognitive Therapies
• Cognitive Therapy
– Aaron Beck
• Certain disorders (esp. depression & anxiety)
can be traced to “cognitive distortions”
(errors in logic)
–“catastrophizing”
–“all-or-none thinking”
–“personalization”
• Help identify distorted thoughts/beliefs
• Treat these as hypotheses to be tested
–Often given “homework”
–Provides evidence to challenge distortions