| attribution | One form of cognitive appraisal concerning beliefs about the causes of life events; how people explain events to themselves will affect their emotional state.
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| behavior therapy | A method of treatment for specific problems that uses the principles of learning theory.
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| behavioral experiment | Cognitive technique by which clients are urged to "reality test" their predictions and assumptions, looking for evidence much as is done in science.
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| behavioral perspective | A theoretical approach that departs from psychodynamic theory in viewing all behavior as a result of learning.
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| cognition | The act of knowing, including mental processes such as emotion, thought, expectation, and interpretation.
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| cognitive appraisal | According to cognitive behaviorists, the process by which a person evaluates a stimulus in accordance with his or her memories, beliefs, and expectations before responding. It accounts for the wide variation in responses to the same stimulus.
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| cognitive behaviorism | An alliance between cognitive theory and behavioral theory which claims that people's actions are often responses not so much to external stimuli as to their own individual mental processing of those stimuli.
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| cognitive case conceptualization | Process by which therapist and client gather information about the client's problems and the situational triggers for the client's feelings, thought patterns, and responses. It leads to an understanding of the interrelationships among developmental experiences, core beliefs, and faulty coping patterns. This conceptualization is used to coordinate, plan, and guide all aspects of the treatment.
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| cognitive distortion | A bias in information processing, patterns of faulty or distorted thinking.
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| cognitive perspective | The view of abnormal behavior as the product of mental processing of environmental stimuli (cognition).
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| cognitive restructuring | A variety of cognitive therapy techniques that help clients increase coping skills, develop problem-solving skills, and change the way they perceive and interpret their worlds.
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| conditioned reflex | A basic mechanism of learning; if a neutral stimulus is paired with a nonneutral stimulus, the organism will eventually respond to the neutral stimulus as it does to the nonneutral stimulus.
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| conditioned reinforcers | Stimuli or needs that one learns to respond to by associating them with primary reinforcers. Also called secondary reinforcers.
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| conditioned response | A simple response to a neutral stimulus that is the result of repeatedly pairing the neutral stimulus with a nonneutral stimulus that would have naturally elicited the response.
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| conditioned stimulus | The neutral stimulus that elicits a particular response as a result of repeated pairings with a nonneutral or unconditioned stimulus that naturally elicits that response.
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| contingency | In operant conditioning, a perceived association between action and consequence which, once learned, directs behavior: An individual will repeat a behavior or cease it in order to obtain or avoid the consequence.
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| contingency management | An operant-conditioning technique in which the consequences of a response are manipulated in order to change the frequency of that response.
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| decatastrophizing | A strategy used in cognitive therapy whereby clients are helped to realize that their fears are exaggerated by being asked to consider what would actually happen if their worst fears were realized.
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| derived stimulus relations | The learning that occurs because the mind learns to group sets of different stimuli (e.g., pictures and objects for the same objects), called stimulus equivalence. This learning mechanism helps to explain why people learn to respond to symbols (e.g., the word money) much as they do to the actual object (e.g., dollar bills).
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| discrimination | The process of learning to distinguish among similar stimuli and to respond only to the appropriate one.
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| disorder-specific bias | The idea that there is a specific mental processing bias associated with each disorder (e.g., social anxiety, depression). It is reflected in different typical thoughts associated with each disorder and can involve different patterns of selective attention, memory, interpretation, etc.
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| exposure | A behavioral treatment for anxiety in which the client is confronted (suddenly or gradually) with his or her feared stimulus.
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| extinction | A process in which a conditioned response is reduced to its preconditioned level. Previously reinforced responses are no longer reinforced.
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| generalization | The process by which an organism, conditioned to respond in a certain way to a particular stimulus, will respond to other, similar stimuli in the same way.
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| hierarchy of fears | A list of anxiety-producing situations in order of their increasing horror to the client (ascending from least to most frightening), established by a patient and therapist as a part of systematic desensitization.
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| hypothesis testing | A strategy used in cognitive therapy whereby clients are urged to test their assumptions in the real world.
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| law of effect | Thorndike's formulation of the importance of reward in the learning process which states that responses that lead to satisfying consequences are strengthened and, therefore, are likely to be repeated, while responses with unsatisfying consequences are weakened and, therefore, unlikely to be repeated.
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| learning | The process whereby behavior changes in response to the environment.
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| negative reinforcement | A conditioning procedure in which a response is followed by the removal of an aversive event or stimulus, thereby promoting the response.
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| operant conditioning | The process by which an organism learns to associate certain consequences with certain actions it has taken. Also called instrumental conditioning.
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| positive reinforcement | A situation in which a response is followed by a positive event or stimulus, thereby increasing the probability that the response will be repeated.
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| primary reinforcer | A stimulus or need that one responds to instinctively, without learning.
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| punishment | The process in which an organism, in order to avoid (or, less often, obtain) a consequence, stops performing a behavior.
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| radical behaviorism | The form of behaviorism developed by B. F. Skinner that proposes that everything a person does, says, or feels constitutes behavior and, even if unobservable, is subject to experimental analysis.
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| rational-emotive therapy | Albert Ellis' approach to cognitive therapy, which sees emotional disturbances as the result of irrational beliefs that guide people's interpretation of events. Clients are helped to appraise their situations realistically and develop new ways of interpreting experience.
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| reinforcement | The process by which behavior is increased or maintained by rewarding consequences. Operant conditioning depends on reinforcement: Most people would not go to work if it weren't for the paycheck.
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| respondent conditioning | The process of learning a conditioned response. Also called classical conditioning.
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| selective attention | An adaptive mechanism by which human beings take in and process only some of the information bombarding their senses at any given moment.
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| schema | An organized structure of information about a particular domain in life; it is stored in the mind and helps a person to organize and process newly learned information.
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| sociocultural perspective | The theory that abnormal behavior is the product of broad social forces and conditions such as poverty, urbanization, and inequality.
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| Socratic questioning | Technique by which the cognitive therapist asks a series of questions designed to get the client to look more objectively at the truth of thoughts, assumptions, and beliefs, and to think about whether they are adaptive.
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| stigma | A label identified with a certain characteristic, usually negative—such as the stigma of being mentally ill.
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| stimulus equivalence | The learning of stimulus response connections without direct learning or mere physical similarities between stimuli. People can transfer stimulus-response connections learned for a set of pictures of animals to a new set of stimuli, such as words that symbolically represent the same stimuli (e.g., the words dog and horse).
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| systematic desensitization | A behavior therapy technique in which the patient, while in a relaxed state, imagines his or her anxiety-provoking stimuli or is presented with the actual stimuli. Progressing from the least to the most feared situations, the patient learns to remain relaxed—a response that should carry over to real-life situations.
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| three-term contingency | A description including a discriminating stimulus, a response, and the consequence of the response.
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| unconditioned response | A natural, unlearned response to a stimulus.
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| unconditioned stimulus | A stimulus that elicits a natural, or unconditioned, response.
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| vulnerability-stress model | Models that identify which persons might be vulnerable to developing clinical disorders (individuals with a particular cognitive style), when (after a stress), and even which disorders they are vulnerable to (depression, eating disorder, etc.).
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