Behavior Therapy: Treatment that focuses on the environment that surrounds the patient, as well as reinforcement and conditioning principles that affect the patient and his or her illness.
Biological Biasing: The idea that people are genetically "primed" for a disorder, and therefore more likely to get it than others in the general population.
Biomedical Therapy: Therapy used to treat psychological disorders by associating the disorders with changing biological or physical mechanisms, i.e., treating mental disorders as disease and administering medical treatment.
Electroconvulsive Therapy (ECT): Treatment in which an electric current is applied to a patient's temples in order to induce upheaval in the central nervous system; also called shock therapy.
Free Association: The principle technique in Freudian psychoanalysis in which patients give a running account of thoughts, feelings, mental images, and physical sensations as they occur, in order to derive a repressed or hidden motivation for their psychological disorder.
Prefrontal Lobotomy: An operation that severs the nerve fibers that connect the brain's frontal lobe to the thalamus. Performed on individuals with severe mental disorders that have not responded to other treatments.
Psychoanalytic Therapy: Freudian technique of exploring unconscious motivations, conflicts, and repressed emotions for a prolonged period of time; an alternative to biomedical treatment.
Psychosurgery: Surgical procedures performed on brain tissue to alleviate psychological disorders.