Question

Comparing Behavior and Cognitive Therapies:

1)View of Psychopathology

2)Goal of Therapy

3)Role of Therapist

4)Role of Unconscious Material

5)Role of Insight

6)Techniques Used

Answer 1

• The basis of cognitive therapy is that thoughts can influence feelings, and that one's emotional response to a situation comes from one's interpretation of that situation.
• Cognitive therapy suggests that many of our emotions are due to our thinking - i.e., the ways that we have perceived or interpreted our environments. Sometimes these thoughts may be biased or distorted.
• For instance, one might interpret an ambiguous phone message as suggesting interpersonal rejection, or physical symptoms as suggesting a medical disorder.
• Others may set unrealistic expectations for themselves, or harbor pervasive concerns regarding their acceptance among others. These types of thoughts can contribute to distorted, biased, or illogical thinking processes that then affect feelings.
• In cognitive therapy, clients learn to:
• Distinguish between thoughts and feelings.
• Become aware of the ways in which thoughts can influence feelings in ways that sometimes are not helpful.
• Learn about thoughts that seem to occur automatically, without even realizing how they may affect emotions.
• Evaluate critically whether these "automatic" thoughts and assumptions are accurate, or perhaps biased.
• Develop the skills to notice, interrupt, and correct these biased thoughts independently.
• Insight is always a part of cognitive therapy- an important part, but not an end in itself.Therapists help patients gain insight into why they have unhelpful or upsetting reactions.
• Their emotions and behavior make sense once they understand how they perceived a given situation. And the characteristic themes in their perceptions (represented by their automatic thoughts) make sense once they understand their underlying beliefs.
• This insight alone, however, is not sufficient for most patients to recover from their psychiatric disorder or improve their psychological functioning. They need to solve problems and change their thinking and behavior to bring about enduring change in their mood and functioning.
• From the first session, we help patients learn how to identify and evaluate their distorted or dysfunctional thinking, a process which results in improvements in how they feel and what they do.
• Some patients, particularly those who have personality disorders, benefit from gaining insight into how their past experiences are influencing their current experience.
• Behavioral approaches vary; however, they focuses mostly on how some thoughts or behaviors may accidentally get "rewarded" within one's environment, contributing to an increase in the frequency of these thoughts and behaviors.
• The therapist's role is to listen, teach, and encourage, while the client's role is to express concerns, learn, and implement that learning. Therefore, CBT therapists do not tell their clients what to do, rather, they search for client strengths and use them to teach their clients how to do.
• Behavior therapies can be applied to a wide range of psychological symptoms to adults, adolescents, and children.
• For instance, imagine a teenager that persistently requests permission to use the family car to go out with friends. After repeated requests to parents, and repeated denials for permission, the teenager becomes angry, irritable, and disobedient towards his/her parents.
• Following a tantrum, the parents decide they can not take the hassle any more and allow their child to borrow the car. By granting permission, the child actually has received a "reward" for throwing a tantrum.
• Behavior therapists say that by granting permission after to a tantrum, the child has "learned" that disobedient behavior is an effective strategy for getting permission.
• Behavior therapy seeks to understand such links between behaviors, rewards, and learning, and change negative patterns. In other words, in behavior therapy, parents and children can "un-learn" unhealthy behaviors, and instead reinforce positive behaviors.
• Although behavioral therapies are different from disorder to disorder, a common thread is that behavioral therapists encourage clients to try new behaviors and not to allow negative "rewards" to dictate the ways in which they act.
• Behavior therapists make frequent use of insight, but avoid the term because dynamic therapists have formulated it in terms of the unconscious. Insight does not necessarily imply belief in the existence of the "unconscious mind." Behavioral insight consists of making the client aware of the antecedents and consequences of target behavior.
  
• Some of the more well known types of treatments are: Relaxation training, systematic desensitization, virtual reality exposure, exposure and response prevention techniques, social skills training, modeling, behavioural rehearsal and homework, and aversion therapy and punishment.