Fundamental Arrtibution Error - Answers The belief that human behavior is best attributed to person
variables rather than environmental/contextual variables
What is the fundamental premise of family systems therapy? - Answers that people are products of their
social contexts and environments
When did clinicians begin treating whole families together? - Answers Mid 1950s
What is the golden age of family therapy or systems approaches? - Answers 1975 to 1985
What period represents social constructionism? - Answers 1986 to present
social constructionism - Answers the idea that our experience is a function of the way we think about it
what caused the shift away from systems perspective? - Answers social constructionism
What did therapists notice when working with schizophrenics? - Answers That when a patient got
better, someone else in the family got worse
some families were perceived as needing a symptomatic member
Who started family therapy? - Answers John Elderkin Bell
Don Jackson
Nathan Ackerman
Murray Bowen
What do family members in therapy talk actually talk about? - Answers reconstructed memories that
resemble the original experiences
What was Freud interested in? - Answers Interested in the family remembered, not the living one
He maintained being against having direct contact with a patient's family
what are the stages of family therapy - Answers initial contact
first interview
early phase
middle phase
, termination
initial contact - Answers get an overview of the presenting problem
first interview - Answers to build an alliance and develop hypotheses
early phase - Answers devoted to refining the therapist's hypothesis into a formulation about what is
maintaining the problem, and work towards solving it
middle phase - Answers therapist to become less active and encourage family members to be more
proactive problem solvers
termination - Answers to recap lessons learned and provide closure
What did family therapy seek to do? - Answers extend and apply the group dynamic literature to the
clinical treatment of families
Quasi stationary social equilibrium - Answers Changing group behavior requires "unfreezing," or a shake-
up of the group's beliefs. (Kurt Lewin)
disrupting family homeostasis - Answers unfreezing or shaking up families and their roels
What do roles in families tend to be? - Answers Reciprocal and complementary
What is family therapy based on? - Answers changing the organization of the family, and then once
transformed, the life of the individual family members is altered
Cybernetics - Answers identified feedback loops which are mechanisms for self regulating the family
system
homeostasis - Answers dysfunctional families resist change
Communication therapists - Answers adopted black box model of therapy
concentrates on input and output
communication therapy - Answers assumes circular causality and analyses interactions occurring in the
here and now
What do communication theorists attempt to do? - Answers teach rules of clear communication
What do communication theorists assume? - Answers that the function of symptoms is to maintain the
family's homeostatic equilibrium
metacommunication - Answers suggests the messages have both report and command functions