Download Intro to Psych - Chapter 16 (Therapy)

- Behavior Therapies
- Focus on changing current behavior, not childhood conflicts/unconscious anxieties (like
psychoanalytic approaches to therapy)
- Classical Conditioning Techniques (are one form of behavior therapy)
- Counterconditioning - involves conditioning new responses to stimuli that
trigger unwanted behaviors.
- Exposure Therapy – exposing people to what they normally avoid or
escape.
- Systematic Desensitization (one type of exposure therapy) typically used in treating phobias.
- People are taught to remain relaxed as they are
progressively exposed to the feared object or situation.
- i.e., we condition a response of relaxation that is
incompatible with the response of fear or anxiety.
- e.g., picture of dog; dog in cage; dog in room; dog nearby;
touching dog
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- Aversive Conditioning - involves pairing an aversive stimulus with unwanted
behavior.
- Typically used to stop problematic behavior like drinking or smoking
- e.g., pairing the taste and smell of alcohol with sickness
by giving someone a drug that makes them vomit when
they drink.
- The problem is that this therapy doesn’t always work, because people
know that the drug is what caused their sickness, not the alcohol.
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- Cognitive Therapies
- Focus on correcting distorted or problematic thinking (rather than focusing on
changing behavior, as in the behavior therapies)
- e.g., you learned earlier about how a negative explanatory style might contribute
to depression (where people blame themselves for negative events that have
happened in their lives), so cognitive therapy would focus on changing that way
of thinking (read the diagram)
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- Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy
- Aims to change the way people think (cognitive) and the way they act (behavior)
- e.g., a person with a fear of social situations might learn to replace their
irrational thinking about social situations with new ways of thinking, and
to practice approaching people.
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- Research has found that people who go through almost any type of professional therapy
improve more than people who do not get help.
- The Relative Effectiveness of Different Psychotherapies (the effectiveness of various
therapies depends somewhat on the condition being treated)
- Behavioral therapies have achieved especially favorable results with specific
behavior problems, such as bed-wetting, phobias, compulsions, and sexual
disorders.
- Cognitive and cognitive-behavioral therapies are especially effective with
anxiety, PTSD, and depression.
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Here are some alternative therapies that research has shown are ineffective or pseudoscientific:
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Energy Therapies – propose to manipulate people’s invisible energy fields (Therapeutic
Touch; Thought Field Therapy)
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Recovered-Memory Therapies – aim to unearth “repressed memories” of abuse
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Rebirthing Therapies – involve reenacting the supposed trauma of birth
•
Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) – involves imagining
traumatic scenes while moving eyes back and forth
•
EMDR does seem to work better than doing nothing at all, because reexposure
and desensitization to trauma is effective; but the eye movements are not
necessary.
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As we saw in Chapter 1, scientific research is important for determining what works and
what doesn’t; unfortunately, there are many therapists who lack scientific training and
continue to use these questionable therapies.
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I hope this course has helped you to understand the difference between scientific and
pseudoscientific practices.
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