Essays on Systematic Desensitization

Like the old saying goes, “Cleanliness is next to godliness,” but at what point does cleaning and being tidy cross the line into mental illness? Likewise, while a large percentage of the population may admit to being a little superstitious and many hotels don’t include a 13th floor, at what point does certain superstitious beliefs and behaviors turn into compulsions or behaviors that must be carried out or else the individual is unable to proceed throughout his or her day? To an outsider, it may appear like a nonsense disease with behaviors that should be easy to curtail by just stopping the ...

Behavior Therapy

Behavior therapy is the use of learning procedures to eliminate maladaptive behaviors such as schizophrenia, phobias, and anxiety (Myers, 2010, p. 652; Passer & Smith, 2010, p. 592). Behavior therapy is based on the thinking that observable behavior is the problem, rather than a symptom of some invisible, underlying issue (Passer & Smith, 2010, p. 592). Behavior therapy helps people to unlearn some behaviors such as fear of public speaking or anxiety. It can also help in arresting other conditions such as autism. The major approaches used in behavior therapy are classical conditioning and operant conditioning. Classical conditioning is a type of ...

- When assessing a patient, one must use the DSM-IV, or Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, to determine what psychological disorder one has (Feldman, p. 455). The DSM-IV uses five axes of information in assessing patients. In Axis I, there is contained all the diagnoses of every aspect of a psychological disorder except mental retardation and the personality disorders. These kinds of disorders include anxiety disorders, ADHD, bipolar disorders, depression, schizophrenia, anorexia, bulimia and more. In Axis II, the DSM-IV covers information related to personality disorders and mental retardation. These personality disorders include schizoid, borderline, antisocial, narcissistic, avoidant, obsessive-compulsive, ...

There are different types of behavioral therapies and these pages give us insight about specific techniques called systematic desensitization and aversive conditioning. These techniques are widely used in psychotherapy helping clients to overcome their problems. Some of them give better results and some of them are not productive as we expected them to be. Therapy called exposure therapy, first mentioned by Jones, unfortunately found its field of application more than 30 years after it was discovered. It was revived by Wolpe and ever since it is widely used in therapeutic practice. This therapy consists of exposing clients to ...

1. model.

2. learner

3. shaper.

4. reinforcer.

1. aversion conditioning

2. higher-order conditioning

3. systematic desensitization

4. Flooding

Tolman showed that rats can learn about their environment without reinforcement. His research illustrated the difference between

1. learning and performance.

2. association and reinforcement

3. goals and learning.

4. learning and mapping.

Taste aversions differ from other instances of classical conditioning because

1. only one association may be required.

2. the US can occur hours after the CS.

3. the US and the CS must be contiguous.

4. both a and b

You are absolutely terrified of dogs. Your behavior therapist is taking you to a kennel where you will be surrounded by 10 dogs. This therapeutic approach is known as

1. flooding

2. higher-order conditioning.

3. aversion ...