Clinical Applications Of Learning Theory

This book examines a variety of psychological disorders from the perspective of the psychology of learning. Grounded in the study of classical and instrumental conditioning, learning theory provides an explanatory framework for the way in which humans acquire information, and when applied, how abnormalities in learning may give rise to clinical conditions. This edited volume addresses a wide range of clinically relevant issues in chapters written by international experts in each field. Individual chapters present experimental research into the neuropsychological basis of the acquisition of fears, phobias and clinical aversions, the placebo and nocebo effects, the psychology of drug addiction and relapse following clinical treatment, as well as the role of learning in Tourette’s syndrome, depression and schizophrenia. This book will be particularly useful for undergraduate and postgraduate students of clinical psychology, behavioural neuroscience and those studying the applications of learning theory to clinical or psychiatric research.

Relational frame theory, or RFT, is the little-understood behavioral theory behind a recent development in modern psychology: the shift from the cognitive paradigm underpinning cognitive behavioral therapy to a new understanding of language and cognition. Learning RFT presents a basic yet comprehensive introduction to this fascinating theory, which forms the basis of acceptance and commitment therapy. The book also offers practical guidance for directly applying it in clinical work. In the book, author Niklas Törneke presents the building blocks of RFT: language as a particular kind of relating, derived stimulus relations, and transformation of stimulus functions. He then shows how these concepts are essential to understanding acceptance and commitment therapy and other therapeutic models. Learning RFT shows how to use experiential exercises and metaphors in psychological treatment and explains how they can help your clients. This book belongs on the bookshelves of psychologists, psychotherapists, students, and others seeking to deepen their understanding of psychological treatment from a behavioral perspective.

Essentials of Patient Education, Second Edition prepares nurses for their increasing role in patient teaching, health education and health promotion. Highly revised, the Second Edition focuses on the basic principles of teaching and learning by emphasizing the role of the professional nurse in educating patients and families effectively and efficiently in various healthcare settings. The Second Edition explores new topics of motor learning and gender differences in the brain as well as, the ethics of patient education and the legal role of the nurse as mandated by state practice. The text features completely revised chapter content and updated references that provide evidence from research and theoretical foundations which substantiate content throughout the text. -- Provided by publisher.

Designed to teach nurses about the development, motivational, and sociocultural differences that affect teaching and learning, this text combines theoretical and pragmatic content in a balanced, complete style. --from publisher description.

"The clinical psychologist after leaving the university and obtaining his first job is subject to two major pressures. On one hand is the pressure created by his training, which directs him toward caution, skepticism of generalizations, and a desire to restrict his activities to sound scientific principles, tested methods, and "approved" theories. On the other hand, his professional co-workers have little patience with his academic qualifications of statements and his long-winded statements of probabilities. They are averse to trying things out on patients. They want something done and want it done immediately. Under these pressures the clinical psychologist is usually forced to compromise. He may maintain the scientific rigor of his experimental methods in research, but in his daily work, because of the need to help patients immediately, he relies more and more on experience and empirical methods. Because of these pressures, the practice of clinical psychology in many instances is unsystematic and confused when viewed from logical or rigorous scientific viewpoints. This confusion, however, is not a necessary condition but the result of the failure of the clinical psychologists' training program to translate and relate the basic knowledge of experimental and theoretical psychology into the practical situations of the clinic, the hospital, and the school. The purpose of this book is to arrive at a systematic theory from which may be drawn specific principles for actual clinical practice, and to illustrate some of the more important applications of the theory to the practice. Rather than attempt to apply this theory to all the problems facing the clinical psychologists, we have chosen to apply it to only two of the clinician's most important problems--the measurement of personality (personality diagnosis) and psychotherapy. Even in these broad areas the application ++

Although many professionals in psychology (including the sub-disciplines of human learning and memory, clinical practice related to psychopathology, neuroscience, educational psychology and many other areas) no longer receive training in learning and conditioning, the influence of this field remains strong. Therefore, many researchers and clinicians have little knowledge about basic learning theory and its current applications beyond their own specific research topic. The primary purpose of the present volume is to highlight ways in which basic learning principles, methodology, and phenomena underpin, and indeed guide, contemporary translational research. With contributions from a distinguished collection of internationally renowned scholars, this 23-chapter volume contains specific research issues but is also broad in scope, covering a variety of topics in which associative learning and conditioning theory apply, such as drug abuse and addiction, anxiety, fear and pain research, advertising, attribution processes, acquisition of likes and dislikes, social learning, psychoneuroimmunology, and psychopathology (e.g., autism, depression, helplessness and schizophrenia). This breadth is captured in the titles of the three major sections of the book: Applications to Clinical Pathology; Applications to Health and Addiction; Applications to Cognition, Social Interaction and Motivation. The critically important phenomena and methodology of learning and conditioning continue to have a profound influence on theory and clinical concerns related to the mechanisms of memory, cognition, education, and pathology of emotional and consummatory disorders. This volume is expected to have the unique quality of serving the interests of many researchers, educators and clinicians including, for example, neuroscientists, learning and conditioning researchers, psychopharmacologists, clinical psychopathologists, and practitioners in the medical field.

The ability to learn is of crucial importance in human life, but understanding this ability has proved to be difficult. There have been many attempts to formulate scientific theories based on both animal experiments and human experience; and these have been applied to education and the treatment of psychological disturbance, with a certain amount of success. Originally published in 1984, this incisive guide to the research and its outcomes provides the background to one of the most debated topics in psychology today. Learning Theory and Behaviour Modification introduces the work of major figures, such as Pavlov and Skinner, which has strongly influenced theories in educational and clinical psychology, and formed the basis of the techniques known as ‘behaviour modification’. As well as giving examples of these techniques the author relates new ideas about the scope and limits of behaviour modification to recent changes in the views of learning theorists. How much can experiments on animals tell us about human psychology?