Module 35 & 36 Bonus Points Answers 1) What is Psychotherapy?

An emotionally charged, confiding interaction between a trained therapist and someone who suffers from psychological difficulties or has trouble achieving personal growth. It is important to keep in mind that half of all therapists describe themselves as taking an eclectic approach, using a blend of therapies depending on the client's problems. 2) What is Psychoanalytic Therapy? How does this differ from Psychodynamic Therapy? Define Free Association, Dream Interpretations and Transference? The major aims for psychoanalysis is to bring repressed feelings into conscious awareness so that they can be dealt with. Also reducing id-ego-superego conflicts will reduce anxiety. Freud believed the through the techniques of free associations, resistances, dreams and transferences and the therapist's interpretation of them, a patient can release previously repressed feelings, thus allowing the patient to gain self-insight. Psychoanalytic therapy emphasizes the formative power of childhood experiences thus aims to excavate the past in hope of unmaking the present. Free Associations: Where the patient relaxes and says whatever comes to mind. The analyst (therapist) listens for indications of resistance, which may indicate sensitive areas or anxietyladen material to investigate. People often omit what seems trivial, irrelevant or shameful but this is not encouraged. Dream interpretations: Interpretations give the patient insight into his/her underlying feelings, wishes, and conflicts that was revealed through resistance. Dream interpretations when you are interpreting the meaning dreams by focusing on the latent (underlying) content. Transference- This when you treat the therapist as if they were someone important in your life. Transference of feelings onto the analyst may also provide insight into the patient's current relationships. Love or hatred for a therapist might indicate earlier relationships with family members or other important people. *Critics site that the interpretations provided cannot be verified or disproved and psychoanalysis is very costly and time consuming. It often takes years of several expensive sessions each week. Thus not many U.S therapist use it. 3) What is Humanistic Therapy? What is Client-Centered Therapy? What techniques does client-centered therapy therapists use? -Humanistic Therapy: These therapies are often referred to as insight therapies because it helps people reduce inner conflicts, and increase psychological functioning and self-understanding and self-awareness of underlying motives and defenses. These therapies emphasize people's natural potential for self-fulfillment by increasing self-awareness and self-acceptance. Unlike psychoanalysis, humanistic therapists focus on the present and future conscious thoughts, responsibility for one's feelings and action and the promotions of personal growth.

-Person-centered Therapy (client-centered therapy)- Developed by Carl Rogers, the therapist uses techniques within a genuine, accepting, empathic environment to facilitate clients' growth. It's focus is on self-perceptions rather than therapist's interpretations. The therapist listens to the person's conscious self-perceptions without judging, interpreting or directing the client toward certain insights. People can then accept even their worst traits and feel valued and whole. The therapist uses active listening such as reflection and clarification. Active listening is empathic listening in which the listener echoes, restates and clarifies what the client has expressed. 4) What is Behavior Therapy? Define counterconditioning? List and define the two types of counterconditioning? Behavior Therapy- It focuses on relearning adaptive ways of behaving such as applying counterconditioning principles. It is a therapy that applies learning principles to the elimination of unwanted behaviors. Behavior therapy uses a procedure called counterconditioning which conditions new responses to stimuli that trigger unwanted classical conditioning. It includes systematic desensitization and aversive conditioning. -1) Systematic desensitization- An exposure therapy that associates a pleasant relaxed state with gradually increasing anxiety-triggering stimuli. It replaces the fear with a positive responses. This technique assumes that you cannot be anxious and relaxed at the same time. The patient learns to relax in the presence of anxiety-producing stimuli. You are asked to constructs an anxiety hierarchy ranging from mildly anxiety provoking to panic-provoking situations and uses progressive muscle relaxation to relax at each successive stage of the hierarchy. The therapist would train you to relax one muscle group after another until you achieve a drowsy state of complete relaxation and comfort. Then the therapist would ask you to imagine, with your eyes closed, a mildly anxiety-arousing situation. You would then signal anxiety by raising you finger then the therapist would ask you to switch off the mental image and go back into relaxation. The imagined scene is repeatedly paired with relaxation until you feel no trace of anxiety. You do this with gradually more provoking situations and then you move on to real situations. This gradually eliminates anxiety. *Virtual reality exposure therapy is somewhat the same premises but you do this in stimulations. It offers a good alternative when the anxiety-arousing situation is too expensive, difficult or embarrassing. This technique has been proven to work. -Aversive Conditioning The goal is to make stimulus undesirable, it can be considered the reverse of systematic desensitization. It's goal is to substitute a negative aversive response for a positive response to a harmful stimulus. It associates an unpleasant state with an unwanted behavior. This procedure is good for the short term but does not work as well in the long run. This is because this aversive situation is only being constructed in therapy so they can actually do the behavior without fear outside of therapy. Thus their ability to discriminate between the aversive conditioning situation and all other situations can limit the treatment's effectiveness. Thus therapist often use this in combination with other treatment methods. 5) What is Cognitive Therapy?

-Cognitive Therapy- Teaches people new, more adaptive ways of thinking and acting based on the assumption that thoughts intervene between events and our emotional reactions. It assumes that our thinking, such as how we interpret and explain events, influence our feelings. The goals is to teach more constructive thought patterns. 6) What is Cognitive-Behavior Theory? -Cognitive-Behavior Therapy- A popular integrated therapy that combines cognitive therapy (changing self-defeating thinking) with behavior therapy (change behavior). It aims not only to change the way people think but also the way people act. They is very effective for anxiety or depression. Since anxiety and mood disorders have the same common problem of emotion regulation one fix would be to train people both to replace their catastrophizing thinking with more realistic appraisals and to practice behaviors that are incompatible with their problems.

7) What is Biomedical Therapy? List and define the 4 major classes of drugs used in Biomedical Therapy? Biomedical Therapy- Prescribed medications or medical procedures that act directly on the patients nervous system. The focus is on physiologically altering the brain's functioning. -This is rooted from psychopharmacology is which the study of the effects of drugs on mind and behavior. Psychopharmacology revolutionized treatment for severe disorders, minimizing the need for hospitalization. However, release from hospitalization has sometimes resulted in a greater number of homeless people with no place to go. In evaluating a drug's effectiveness, researchers use the double-blind technique where neither the patient nor drug administrator know whether the patient is receiving the actual drug or a placebo. -Antipsychotic Drugs- Used to treat schizophrenia by blocking dopamine receptors. They often produce negative side-effect such as Tardive Diskinesia which is similar to Parkinson's disease. Also dosage must be carefully monitored. -Anti-anxiety drugs (Valium and Xanax) Relives anxiety by depression the central nervous system. They can be useful when combine with other therapy but their calming effect can lead to drug dependence -Antidepressant drugs (Prozac, Zoloft, Paxil)- Ease depression by making the neurotransmitters norepinephrine and serotonin more available either by blocking reuptake back into the neuron or by stopping the action of the enzyme that breaks down these neurotransmitters. The full benefit of these drugs can take up to 4 weeks. Sometimes also used to treat anxiety. -Lithium is a mood-stabilizing drugs. This is a simple ion used to treat bipolar disorder's manic and depression symptoms. It has dangerous side effects and can be toxic so dosages must be carefully monitored. *Other important concepts -resistance

-a token economy -placebo effect -electroconvulsive therapy -Psychosurgery -lobotomy