| Term | Definition |
|---|
| psychotherapy | an emotionally charged, confiding interaction between a trained therapist and someone who suffers from psychological difficulties. |
| biomedical therapy | prescribed medications or medical procedures that act directly on the patient's nervous system. |
| eclectic approach | an approach to psychotherapy that, depending on the client's problems, uses techniques from various forms of therapy. |
| psychoanalysis | Freud's theory of personality and therapeutic technique that attributes thoughts and actions to unconscious motives and conflicts. Freud believed the patient's free associations, resistances, dreams, and transferences—and the therapist's interpretations of them—released previously repressed feelings, allowing the patient to gain self-insight. (pp. 597, 686) |
| resistance | in psychoanalysis, the blocking from consciousness of anxiety-laden material. |
| interpretation | in psychoanalysis, the analyst's noting supposed dream meanings, resistances, and other significant behaviors and events in order to promote insight. |
| transference | in psychoanalysis, the patient's transfer to the analyst of emotions linked with other relationships (such as love or hatred for a parent). |
| active listening | empathic listening in which the listener echoes, restates, and clarifies. A feature of Rogers' client-centered therapy. |
| counterconditioning | a behavior therapy procedure that conditions new responses to stimuli that trigger unwanted behaviors; based on classical conditioning. Includes exposure therapies and aversive conditioning. |
| exposure therapies | behavioral techniques, such as systematic desensitization, that treat anxieties by exposing people (in imagination or actuality) to the things they fear and avoid. |
| systematic desensitization | a type of counterconditioning that associates a pleasant relaxed state with gradually increasing anxietytriggering stimuli. Commonly used to treat phobias. |
| virtual reality exposure therapy | An anxiety treatment that progressively exposes people to simulations of their greatest fears, such as airplane flying, spiders, or public speaking. |
| aversive conditioning | a type of counterconditioning that associates an unpleasant state (such as nausea) with an unwanted behavior (such as drinking alcohol). |
| token economy | an operant conditioning procedure in which people earn a token of some sort for exhibiting a desired behavior and can later exchange the tokens for various privileges or treats. |
| cognitive therapy | therapy that teaches people new, more adaptive ways of thinking and acting; based on the assumption that thoughts intervene between events and our emotional reactions. |
| family therapy | therapy that treats the family as a system. Views an individual's unwanted behaviors as influenced by or directed at other family members; attempts to guide family members toward positive relationships and improved communication. |
| regression toward the mean | the tendency for extremes of unusual scores to fall back (regress) toward their average. |
| psychopharmacology | the study of the effects of drugs on mind and behavior. |
| tardive dyskinesia | involuntary movements of the facial muscles, tongue, and limbs; a possible neurotoxic side effect of long-term use of antipsychotic drugs that target D2 dopamine receptors. |
| electroconvulsive therapy | a biomedical therapy for severely depressed patients in which a brief electric current is sent through the brain of an anesthetized patient. |
| repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation | the application of repeated pulses of magnetic energy to the brain; used to stimulate or suppress brain activity. |
| psychosurgery | surgery that removes or destroys brain tissue in an effort to change behavior. |
| lobotomy | a now-rare psychosurgical procedure once used to calm uncontrollably emotional or violent patients. The procedure cut the nerves that connect the frontal lobes to the emotion-controlling centers of the inner brain. |
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