Download AP Psych Lesson 16.5

Chapter 16
• Psychodynamic therapists expect problems to
subside as people gain insight into their
unresolved and unconscious tensions.
• Humanistic therapists expect problems to
diminish as people get in touch with their
feelings
• Behavior therapists doubt the healing power of
self-awareness. They assume that problem
behaviors are the problems, and the application
of learning principles can eliminate them.
• The goal of this method is to teach people more
desirable (healthier) ways of behaving
• Two techniques involved in this method are
counterconditioning and operant conditioning
• The choice of technique will depend on the
nature of the person’s disorder
• Counterconditioning helps in the unlearning of
undesirable behaviors by using classical
conditioning to evoke new responses to stimuli
that are triggering unwanted behaviors.
• There are two main types of
counterconditioning techniques: exposure
therapy and aversive conditioning
• Exposure therapies treat anxieties by exposing
people (in imagination or actual situations) to
the things that they fear and avoid. These are
the most widely used type of behavior
therapies.
• Systematic desensitization is used as a
treatment for phobias. The therapist trains the
client to relax in the presence of an anxiety
causing situation
• Ex—Imagine you are afraid of public speaking.
• The therapist may first ask you to construct a
hierarchy of anxiety-triggering speaking situations.
• Next, using progressive relaxation, you would be
trained to relax your muscles to a state of complete
relaxation
• Then, the therapist would ask you to imagine , with
your eyes closed, a mildly anxiety-arousing situation.
(You are having coffee with friends and are trying to
decide whether to speak up)
• If you start to feel anxiety , the therapist would
instruct you to switch off the image and return to
relaxation.
• The imagined scene is repeatedly paired with
relaxation until you feel no anxiety.
• The therapist would progress up your hierarchy,
and after several sessions, you move to actual
situations and practice what you had only
imagined before.
• Aversive conditioning occurs when the therapist
replaces a positive response to a stimulus with a
negative response.
• Ex—for a person who wants to stop smoking, the
person might be asked to smoke several
cigarettes at once so that the overexposure to
smoke is unpleasant. With repetition, the person
may come to avoid smoking.
• Aversive conditioning is the reverse of systematic
desensitization—it seeks to condition an aversion to
something the person should avoid.
• The problem is that cognition influences
conditioning—people know that outside the
therapist’s office they can smoke without fear of
nausea.
• So, therapists often use aversive conditioning in
combination with other treatments.
• Based on the assumption that behavior that is
reinforced tends to be repeated, behavior that is not
is extinguished
• So, therapist will give you a reward for desirable
behavior
• Rewards used to modify behavior vary.
• For some, the reinforcing power of attention or
praise is enough.
• Others require concrete rewards, such as food.
• In institutional settings, therapists may create a token
economy. When people display appropriate
behavior (getting out of bed, washing, dressing,
talking coherently) they receive a token as a positive
reinforcer. Later, they can exchange their
accumulated tokens for various rewards (candy, TV
time, better living quarters)
• Operant conditioning has sometimes proved effective
in severe cases like schizophrenia
• Is especially effective for well defined problems
such as phobias, compulsions, marital problems,
bed-wetting, and sexual disorders.
• It is less effective than cognitive therapy for
treating depression