Individuals who are suffering with
psychological disorders or the family who are supporting them may sometimes
have thoughts how psychotherapy or cognitive behaviour therapy change the brain
and how far the significant and evident results in such cases......
The
recent advances in neuro-imaging techniques have helped to increase the understanding
of the neuronal correlates of mental disorders.
Psychological
interventions can promote changes in the thoughts, feelings, and behaviours of
patients. Can we then say that the psychological treatment promotes brain
changes? Unfortunately, the biological mechanisms related to psychotherapy are
little known. On the other hand, the arrival of neuro-imaging techniques makes
it possible to investigate the neurobiological consequences of psychological
treatment.
Cognitive behavioral
therapy (CBT)
proposes to treat various mental disorders. The literature has reported that
CBT has treatment models with high efficacy rates.
One
of the basic assumptions of CBT is that feelings and behaviors are largely
influenced by the way the situations are interpreted. It is believed that
individuals respond to the cognitive representations of the events, instead of
responding to the events themselves. Consequently, they can process information
in a way that does not match their reality, characterizing the cognitive distortions.
Thus, the ways in which the facts are construed play an important role in the
formation and maintenance of psychiatric disorders
The
literature shows that many mental disorders are involved with the inability to
control fear and difficulty in regulating negative emotions. These data suggest
that the conditioning of fear and the difficulty in regulating emotions play a
major role in the formation and maintenance of anxiety disorders.
It
is important to highlight that CBT treatment contains specific techniques
(exposure, distraction, and cognitive restructuring) which allow both the
extinction of conditioned fear and the cognitive regulation of emotions.
Cognitive
behavior therapy has proved to be effective in the treatment of various mental
disorders, although the neurobiological effects of its action are little known.
CBT
favors the restructuring of thought, modification of feelings and behaviors,
and promotes new learning. Consequently it involves synaptic changes. The
investigation of changes in brain activity resulting from successful CBT
treatment allows us to clarify the neural substrates underlying psychotherapy.
Neuroimaging
studies provide a means to observe and characterize changes in brain
functioning related to psychological and pharmacological interventions.
Consequently, to understand how individuals process a stimulus can be an
important piece of information for therapeutic response. The neuroscientific
findings associated with the neuroimaging studies can enhance our knowledge of the
neurobiological foundations of psychotherapies, as well as improve
interventions in order to increase treatment efficacy.
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