| Term | Definition |
|---|
| Psychotherapy | The treatment of emotional or behavior problems through psychological techniques. |
| Placebo effect | A nonspecific improvement that occurs as a result of a person's expectations of change rather than as a direct result of any specific therapeutic treatment. |
| Double-blind techniques | A research technique in which neither the experimenter nor the participants know who is in the control and experimental groups. |
| Demand characteristics | Elements of an experimental situation that might cause a participant to perceive the situation in a certain way or become aware of the purpose of the study and thus bias the participant to behave in a certain way, and in so doing, distort results. |
| Psychoanalysis | A lengthy insight therapy that was developed by Freud and aims at uncovering conflicts and unconscious impulses through special techniques, including free association, dream analysis, and transference. |
| Psychodynamically | Therapies that use approaches or techniques derived from Freud, but that reject or modify some elements of Freud's theory. |
| Insight therapy | Any therapy that attempts to discover relationships between unconscious motivations and current abnormal behavior. |
| Free association | Psychoanalytic technique in which a person is asked to report to the therapist his or her thoughts and feelings as they occur, regardless of how trivial, illogical, or objectionable their content may appear. |
| Dream analysis | Psychoanalytic technique in which a patient's dreams are described in detail and interpreted so as to provide insight into the individual's unconscious motivations. |
| Interpretation | In Freud's theory, the technique of providing a context, meaning, or cause for a specific idea, feeling, or set of behaviors; the process of tying a set of behaviors to its unconscious determinant. |
| Resistance | In psychoanalysis, an unwillingness to cooperate, which a patient signals by showing a reluctance to provide the therapist with information or to help the therapist understand or interpret a situation. |
| Transference | Psychoanalytic phenomenon in which a therapist becomes the object of a patient's emotional attitudes about an important person in the patient's life, such as a parent. |
| Working through | In psychoanalysis, the repetitive cycle of interpretation, resistance to interpretation, and transference. |
| Client-centered therapy | An insight therapy, developed be Carl Rogers, that seeks to help people evaluate the world and themselves from their own perspective by providing them with a nondirective environment and unconditional positive regard; also known as person-centered therapy. |
| Behavior therapy | A therapy that is based on the application of learning principles to human behavior and that focuses on changing overt behaviors rather than on understanding subjective feelings, unconscious processes, or motivations; also known as behavior modification. |
| Symptom substitution | The appearance of one overt symptom to replace another that has been eliminated by treatment. |
| Token economy | An operant conditioning procedure in which individuals who display appropriate behavior receive tokens that they can exchange for desirable items or activities. |
| Time-out | An operant conditioning procedure in which a person is physically removed from sources of reinforcement to decrease the occurrence of undesired behaviors. |
| Counterconditioning | Process of reconditioning in which a person is taught a new, more adaptive response to a familiar stimulus. |
| Systematic desensitization | A three-stage counterconditioning procedure in which people are taught to relax when confronting stimuli that forming elicited anxiety. |
| Aversive counterconditioning | A counterconditioning technique in which an aversive or noxious stimulus is paired with a stimulus with the undesirable behavior. |
| Rational-emotive therapy | A cognitive behavior therapy that emphasizes the importance of logical, rational thought processes. |
| Group therapy | Psychotherapeutic process in which several people meet as a group with a therapist to receive psychological help. |
| Family therapy | A type of therapy in which two or more people who are committed to one another's well-being are treated at once, in and effort to change the ways the interact. |
| Psychosurgery | Brain surgery used in the past to alleviate symptoms of serious mental disorders. |
| Electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) | A treatment for severe mental illness in which an electric current is briefly applied to the head in order to produce a generalized seizure. |
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