Download Behavior Therapies

Behavior and Cognitive Therapies
Mr. Koch
AP Psychology
Andover High School
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)
3. Move up hierarchy when can tolerate visualizing a
situation without distress (now often involves reallife or virtual reality exposure)
•
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
• Can be exchanged for desired items/activities
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