free association

Examples of free association in the following topics:

• Introduction to Psychotherapy

  • It encourages patients to use free association as a way to come to insights about unresolved issues from the past that are resulting in emotional or behavioral problems in the present.
  • Techniques such as dream interpretation, free association, transference, and analysis of the unconscious mind were developed.

• Psychodynamic and Psychoanalytic Therapy

  • The use of free association as a core method to explore internal conflicts.
  • During free association, patients are invited to relate whatever comes to mind during the therapeutic session, without censoring their thoughts.

• Evaluating the Psychodynamic Approach to Personality

  • These objections raise issues with many of Freud's theories and methods including his singular focus on the structure of the human mind, his myopic view of human sexuality, his treatment using free association and transference, his reluctance to study children, and his utter lack of empirical evidence.

• Defining Personality

  • Personality as a field of study began with Hippocrates, a physician in ancient Greece, who theorized that personality traits and human behaviors are based on four separate temperaments associated with four fluids of the body known as “humors”.
  • Interestingly, several words in the English language that describe personality traits are rooted in humorism: "bilious" means bad-tempered, which is rooted in humorists' thought that yellow bile was associated with grumpiness; "melancholic" is from the Greek words for "black bile," again rooted in humorists' thought that black bile was associated with depression.
  • Humanistic theory argues that an individual's subjective free will is the most important determinant of behavior.

• Basic Principles of Operant Conditioning: Skinner

  • He also believed that this learned association could end, or become extinct, if the reinforcement or punishment was removed.
  • After the experience of multiple trials, the rats learned the association between the lever and food and began to spend more of their time in the box procuring food than performing any other action.
  • He did not include room in his research for ideas such as free will or individual choice; instead, he posited that all behavior could be explained using learned, physical aspects of the world, including life history and evolution.

• Reasoning

  • It is closely associated with such human activities as philosophy, science, language, mathematics, and art, and is normally considered to be a definitive characteristic of human nature.
  • Reason or "reasoning" is associated with thinking, cognition, and intellect.
  • They are simplistic rules and habitual, automatic thinking responses that free us from exhausting ourselves by trying to process all available information.

• Latent Learning

  • It occurs without any obvious reinforcement of the behavior or associations that are learned.
  • One day you receive a text telling you there is free pizza at a restaurant in the neighborhood, but only for the next 15 minutes.

• History of Intelligence Testing

  • He further argued that g should be free of cultural bias such as differences in language and education type.
  • This test is a nonverbal group test typically used in educational settings, designed to measure the reasoning ability associated with g.

• Generalized Anxiety Disorder

  • People with GAD often characterize it as a feeling of "free-floating anxiety"—a term that Sigmund Freud used in his early work.
  • Similarly, long-term alcohol use is associated with the development of anxiety disorders, with evidence that prolonged abstinence can in turn result in the remission of anxiety symptoms.

• Cognitive and Cognitive-Behavioral Therapies

  • In adults, CBT has been shown to have effectiveness and a role in the treatment plans for anxiety disorders, depression, eating disorders, chronic low back pain, personality disorders, psychosis, substance use disorders, and in the adjustment, depression, and anxiety associated with fibromyalgia and post-spinal-cord injuries.
  • Critics argue that one of the hidden assumptions in CBT is that of determinism, or the absence of free will, because CBT invokes a type of cause-and-effect relationship with cognition.
  • Specifically, critics argue that since CBT holds that external stimuli from the environment enter the mind, causing different thoughts that lead to emotional states, there is no room in CBT theory for agency, or free will.