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IB DP Psychology — Health Psychology (Paper 2 Option) | SL & HL | Paper 2
🎯 Learning Intentions By the end of this note, you will be able to:
- Define cognitive-behavioural therapy (CBT), cognitive restructuring, and exposure therapy using IB-aligned terminology.
- Explain how CBT targets maladaptive thought patterns and how this leads to changes in behaviour and emotional wellbeing.
- Describe the role of therapeutic alliance, homework tasks, and behavioural activation in the effectiveness of psychological treatments.
- Evaluate research evidence for psychological treatments using supporting and opposing studies in ACAS format.
- Apply psychological treatment concepts to a real-world case study from the cognitive and sociocultural perspectives.
- Discuss the extent to which psychological treatments provide a complete and effective approach to treating mental health disorders.
- Analyse psychological treatments using relevant concept areas: Bias, Causality, Change, Perspective, and Responsibility.
Introduction & Context
Imagine you have been struggling with a persistent fear — perhaps of social situations, of failure, or of being judged by others. Every time you face the feared situation, your heart races, your thoughts spiral, and you find yourself avoiding it entirely. Over time, the avoidance itself becomes the problem: the less you face the situation, the more threatening it seems, and the more your world shrinks. Now imagine that someone sat with you, helped you examine the thoughts driving that fear, and gently guided you to test whether those thoughts were actually true. This is, in essence, what psychological treatment attempts to do.
Unlike biological treatments that work primarily through pharmacology or physical intervention, psychological treatments work through conversation, reasoning, and structured behavioural change. They are grounded in the idea that the way we think about ourselves, others, and the world has a profound effect on how we feel and behave — and that these patterns of thinking can be identified, challenged, and changed. Understanding how and why these treatments work, and where their limitations lie, is central to the Health Psychology option in IB Psychology.
🔧 Analogy — Debugging a Computer Programme Think of the human mind as a computer running a programme. Sometimes the programme contains bugs — lines of faulty code that cause the system to crash or behave unexpectedly. Biological treatments might try to change the hardware (the brain's chemistry). Psychological treatments, by contrast, try to find and rewrite the faulty code — the distorted beliefs, unhelpful assumptions, and maladaptive behaviours — so the system runs more effectively. The programme can be improved without replacing the hardware.
Core Concepts
When psychologists began to study mental health disorders systematically, they noticed something striking: people with conditions like depression and anxiety did not simply feel bad — they thought in characteristic, predictable ways. They catastrophised minor setbacks, assumed the worst about themselves, and interpreted neutral events as threatening. Aaron Beck, working with depressed patients in the 1960s, called these patterns cognitive distortions — systematic errors in thinking that maintained and worsened psychological distress. This observation became the foundation of one of the most widely used psychological treatments in the world.
📖 Key Definition — Cognitive-Behavioural Therapy (CBT) Cognitive-behavioural therapy (CBT) is a structured, time-limited psychological treatment that aims to reduce