1. Behavior and Cognitive Therapies Bob Newhart Therapist "Stop it!"
AP Psychology

2. Behavior Therapies

3. Behavior Therapies
View psychological disorders as learned behaviors to be fixed by learning new behaviors (not searching for underlying causes)
Based upon Behaviorist and Social-Cognitive approaches to personality/disorder

4. Systematic Desensitization
Developed by Joseph Wolpe (1958) to help patients overcome phobias and other forms of anxiety
Client visualizes a series of anxiety-provoking stimuli while remaining relaxed
Teach “progressive relaxation training” procedures
Create a “desensitization hierarchy” (series of increasingly fear provoking situations)

5. Systematic Desensitization
3. Move up hierarchy when can tolerate visualizing a situation without distress (now often involves real-life or virtual reality exposure) 4. Gradually weakens learned association between anxiety & feared object

8. Exposure Techniques “Flooding” Based on extinction
Keeps people in feared (but harmless) situation and prevents them from normally rewarding pattern of escape
Association between feared stimulus and fear response gradually weakens

10. Behavior Therapies Modeling
Client watches therapist or others perform desirable behaviors – learn vicariously
May be combined with gradual practice for client
Aversive Conditioning
Uses classical conditioning to create a negative response to a stimulus
i.e. – nausea or shock with undesirable actions, thoughts, situations (drinking, smoking, etc.)

11. Behavior Therapies Positive reinforcements
Set up contingencies (rules) that specify behaviors to be strengthened through reinforcement
Has shown success with children with Autism
“Token Economy”
System for improving behavior of institutionalized clients - desirable behaviors are rewarded with tokens
Can be exchanged for desired items/activities

12. Cognitive Therapies

13. Cognitive Therapies Rational-Emotive Behavior Therapy (REBT)
Albert Ellis
Assumes psychological problems like anxiety, guilt, depression are caused by how people think about events (not the events themselves)
Aims to identify and change self-defeating thoughts
(i.e. “shoulds” and “musts”)

14. Cognitive Therapies Cognitive Therapy Aaron Beck
Certain disorders (esp. depression & anxiety)
can be traced to “cognitive distortions”
(errors in logic)
“catastrophizing”
“all-or-none thinking”
“personalization”
Help identify distorted thoughts/beliefs
Treat these as hypotheses to be tested
Often given “homework”
Provides evidence to challenge distortions