| Vocab | Definition |
| Psychotherapy | A planned, emotionally charged, confiding interaction between a trained, socially sanctioned healer and a sufferer. |
| Biomedical Therapy | A prescribed medication or medical procedure that acts 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 | Sigmund Freud's therapeutic technique. 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. |
| 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). |
| Client-Centered Therapy | A humanistic therapy, developed by Carl Rogers, in which the therapist uses techniques, such as active listening within a genuine, accepting, empathic environment to facilitate clients' growth. |
| Active Listening | Empathic listening in which the listener echoes, restates, and clarifies. A feature of Rogers' client centered therapy. |
| Behavior Therapy | Therapy that applies learning principles to the elimination of unwanted behaviors. |
| Counterconditioning | A behavior therapy procedure that conditions new responses to stimuli that trigger unwanted behaviors; based on classical conditioning. Includes exposure therapy and aversive conditioning. |
| Exposure therapies | Behavioral techniques, such as systematic desensitization, that treat anxieties by exposing people to the things the fear and avoid. |
| Systematic Desensitization | A type of counterconditioning that associates a pleasant relaxed state with gradually increasing anxiety-triggering 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 with an unwanted behavior. |
| 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. |
| Cognitive-Behavior Therapy | A popular integrated therapy that combines cognitive therapy (changing self-defeating thinking) with behavior therapy (changing behavior). |
| 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. |
| meta-analysis | A procedure for statistically combining the results of many different research studies. |
| 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. |
| Electro Convulsive Therapy (ECT) | 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 (rTMS) | 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. |
