Treatment Planning & Goal Setting Flashcards
7 cards from real CBT practice questions. Tap to flip, then mark Knew It or Still Learning — missed cards come back until you master them.
Read the first 7 Treatment Planning & Goal Setting flashcards as text
Which goal-writing framework ensures CBT treatment goals are observable and time-bound?
Answer: SMART goals
SMART goals (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-bound) are the standard framework for writing verifiable CBT treatment goals.
A client with panic disorder refuses to include exposure tasks in the treatment plan. The most appropriate CBT response is to:
Answer: Collaboratively explore the refusal and negotiate a graduated approach
Collaborative empiricism guides CBT therapists to explore client reluctance and co-create an acceptable, graduated exposure hierarchy rather than forcing or abandoning the evidence-based intervention.
When prioritizing treatment targets in a complex case with comorbid depression and social anxiety, the CBT principle is to:
Answer: Target whichever disorder the client finds most distressing or functionally impairing
CBT prioritizes the problem causing the greatest distress or functional impairment, collaboratively determined with the client.
Which tool is MOST commonly used in CBT to operationalize a client's long-term goal into session-level tasks?
Answer: Problem list with subgoals
A hierarchical problem list breaks long-term goals into measurable subgoals and specific session-level tasks, making progress trackable.
Functional analysis in CBT treatment planning primarily helps the therapist:
Answer: Understand the antecedents, behaviors, and consequences maintaining the problem
Functional analysis (ABC analysis) identifies antecedents, behaviors, and consequences to reveal the contingencies maintaining a target problem.
A treatment plan goal states: 'Client will feel less anxious.' The primary problem with this goal is that it is:
Answer: Not measurable or specific
Goals must be specific and measurable; 'feel less anxious' cannot be objectively verified or tracked across sessions.
In CBT, the concept of 'treatment focus' refers to:
Answer: The central problem or mechanism targeted to produce the most therapeutic change
Treatment focus identifies the core maintaining mechanism (e.g., avoidance, rumination) whose change will produce the broadest improvement.