Dissonance induction and reduction: A possible principle and connectionist mechanism for why therapies are effective
Section snippets
Principles
Castonguay and Beutler (2006) suggested guidelines for identifying empirically supported principles of psychotherapy. They defined therapeutic principles as, “the conditions under which a concept (participant, relationship quality, or intervention) will be effective.” (p. 6). Empirically supported principles were divided into three main categories: participant factors (characteristics of both therapist and patient), relationship factors (attributes of the therapeutic relationship that are
Mechanisms
Kazdin (2007) defined mechanism as, “the basis for the effect, i.e., the processes or events that are responsible for the change; the reasons why change occurred or how change came about.” (p. 3). Mechanism information entails a causal sequence of events leading to change. Unfortunately, it appears that while the field of clinical psychology can confidently assert that empirically supported therapies create change, there is little published information about how these changes occur (cf. Kazdin,
A connectionist mechanism for anxiety treatment
The network of a phobic person before treatment can be understood to function as follows. The top stimulus row pertains to anxiety-related stimuli. Their activation is processed down through the connections diagramed by the solid lines to the nodes in the second layer as described in the previous section, which, like the O in the S-O-R model is where anxiety-related cognitions and emotions are located/processed. More than two such nodes are clearly required but are not illustrated for
Validation issues
The section more fully addresses the question “How valid is the dissonance induction/reduction principle? Mathematics is a deductive system that enables one to prove the truth/validity of a conclusion. Science is an inductive system that empirically supports hypotheses based on consistency between expectation and observation. No amount of evidence can prove the validity of a hypothesis because subsequent data can falsify it at any future time. This is why we speak of empirically supported
Dissonance reduction
Cognitive dissonance is a deeply rooted well supported explanatory social psychological principle Inspired by Lewin's field-theoretical approach (Lewin, 1936), Heider (1958) applied the principle of consonance to interpersonal relationships between two persons and an attitude object which could be another person, a topic of conversation, or an event in the form of POX diagrams where P = person, O = other person, and X = attitude object. The lines connecting the three vertices of the resulting
Dissonance induction and reduction explains EST's for depression
The purpose of this section is to apply the dissonance induction/reduction principle to EST's for depression including behavior therapy (BT), cognitive therapy (CT), and interpersonal psychotherapy (IPT; Nathan & Gorman, 2002). Though each modality differs in its underlying assumptions regarding the etiology and maintenance of depression and therapeutic emphases, we shall argue that cognitive dissonance induction and reduction is a commonly shared principle, not only in terms of symptom
Biases, learned helplessness and rumination
Cognitive dissonance theory can also help explain a number of empirical findings related to information processing patterns among depressed individuals such as depressive realism (Dobson and Franche, 1989, Moore and Fresco, 2007), learned helplessness theory and its variations (Abramson et al., 1989, Abramson et al., 1978, Seligman and Maier, 1967, Sideridis, 2005), and the finding that ruminative thinking is involved in the maintenance of depressive symptoms (Lyubomirsky and Nolen-Hoeksema,
Limitations
We now identify and discuss six limitations to the dissonance induction/reduction principle presented above. First, the dissonance induction/reduction principle does not fully explain why some therapists succeed more than others who report using the same techniques. Some therapists may be more effective at inducing dissonance and facilitating its reduction than other therapists. Two therapists implementing what they believe to be the same therapies may in fact not be duplicating therapeutic
Implications for clinical practice
The main point we want to emphasize is that effective clinicians, regardless of their theoretical orientation, probably implement the dissonance induction/reduction principle, which we have argued changes the way their clients to think, feel, and behave because it causes their brain network to process information differently. Three positive expectations result from this view. First, we expect that clinicians can become more effective by consciously using the dissonance induction/reduction
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2021, CortexCitation Excerpt :Moreover, and as mentioned briefly above, the impact of executive functions on episodic memory could also manifest itself during the encoding period of each valuation and choice stages, and most importantly during the recall of previous choices at the critical re-evaluation (R2) stage. By the same token, frontal lobe sub-regions such as ACC have been found to be associated with both the induction and the reduction stages of dissonance (de Vries, Byrne, & Kehoe, 2015; Tryon & Misurell, 2008). Exhaustively elucidating the specific cognitive and neural relationships between executive functions and CIPC remains an exciting goal for future research.
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2014, PsychoneuroendocrinologyCitation Excerpt :Exposure psychotherapies likewise teach patients with mood and anxiety disorders to imagine a graded series of stress inducing situations and then encourage direct interaction with these stressors in vivo (McNally, 2007). These procedures promote learning (Craske et al., 2008; Tryon and Misurell, 2008) and provide opportunities to practice coping skills. Previously, we found that juvenile squirrel monkeys exposed to stress inoculation training sessions comprised of intermittent social separations subsequently show diminished behavioral indications of anxiety and lower stress-levels of cortisol compared to juvenile monkeys not exposed to prior separations (Lyons et al., 2009, 2010b).
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2011, Clinical Psychology ReviewCitation Excerpt :It is a model that works. This model is different from the more familiar models in psychology that are presented as diagrams with boxes and arrows but leave unspecified the mechanism by which changes occur (Tryon & Misurell, 2008). A consideration of the workings of exposure supports Marks' (2000) view that different schools of therapy often give similar procedures different names.
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2009, Journal of Anxiety DisordersCitation Excerpt :Tryon (2005) also proposed a connectionist mechanism to explain why systematic desensitization and exposure therapy work that is more consistent with the empirical literature than all previous explanations were. Tryon and Misurell (2008) formulated a dissonance induction/reduction principle and provided a connectionist explanation for why empirically supported treatments are effective. Tryon (2000) used connectionist principles to explain the relevance of behavior genetics to behavior therapy.
No ownership of common factors
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