behaviour therapy
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What is behaviour therapy?
Behavior therapy, also known as behavior modification, uses psychological counseling to change undesirable or potentially harmful activity by applying experimentally derived principles of learning. It focuses on symptoms and behaviors rather than unconscious processes and insight.
Pioneered by Ivan Pavlov and B.F. Skinner, behavior therapy employs techniques such as conditioning and reinforcement schedules to establish and eliminate responses. One prominent technique is desensitization, where patients confront anxiety-producing situations to overcome fear, often using relaxation training. Other approaches include aversion therapy, which associates undesirable behaviors with unpleasant stimuli, and reinforcement, which rewards desired responses.
Behavior therapy has been applied to various conditions, including phobias, addiction, and developmental challenges. Modern cognitive behavior therapy (CBT) integrates cognitive treatments to address negative thinking patterns.
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How does behaviour therapy help people change their actions?
Behavior therapy helps people change their actions by applying experimentally derived learning principles to treat psychological disorders. It focuses on symptom relief and behavior modification rather than unconscious processes or personality changes.
Key techniques include aversion therapy, which associates undesirable behaviors with unpleasant stimuli, and reinforcement, which rewards desired responses. Exposure therapy, particularly for phobias, involves controlled exposure to feared situations to break the association between the situation and anxiety. Systematic desensitization gradually exposes patients to anxiety-producing stimuli while teaching relaxation techniques. These methods aim to weaken maladaptive habits and strengthen adaptive ones, effectively changing behavior.
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What kinds of problems can behaviour therapy treat?
Behavior therapy uses learning principles to address psychological disorders by focusing on observable behaviors rather than unconscious processes. It can be effective in treating a range of problems in both adults and children.
Behavior therapy is used to change harmful habits, such as smoking cessation, weight loss, alcohol abuse, and stress management. Cognitive behavior techniques have been used to treat insomnia, hypertension, headaches, chronic pain, and phobias. For children, behavior therapy can help with academic performance, enuresis, and stuttering, while in adults it can address marital discord. It has also been applied to obsessive-compulsive behavior, drug addiction, and anxiety disorders. Exposure therapy, a type of behavior therapy, is effective for phobic states and OCD.
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What are some common techniques used in behaviour therapy?
Behavior therapy, also known as behavior modification, employs psychological counseling to change undesirable or potentially harmful activity. Several techniques are used in behavior therapy, including:
- Rational emotive therapy Aims to alter inaccurate or irrational thoughts that lead to negative emotions or maladaptive behavior.
- Neurofeedback Uses electronic devices to provide feedback, helping patients control subtle physical processes.
- Relaxation training Reduces stress through techniques like deep muscle relaxation exercises.
- Aversion therapy Conditions a patient to reduce or avoid an undesirable behavior by associating the behavior with an undesirable stimulus.
- Exposure therapy Weakens a conditioned response, often used to treat phobias.
- Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) Identifies faulty patterns of thinking or behavior and replaces them with desirable ones.
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How is behaviour therapy different from other types of therapy, like talk therapy?
Behavior therapy differs from other forms of therapy, like talk therapy, because it focuses on changing specific, undesirable behaviors through psychological counseling. Unlike psychiatric methods and psychoanalysis, behavior therapy is symptom-oriented and gives little attention to unconscious processes, gaining new insight, or causing fundamental personality change.
Behavioral therapists focus on current symptoms and abnormal behaviors rather than past experiences, concentrating on observable actions and words instead of inferred meanings. By applying principles derived from experimental psychology and learning theory, behavior therapy weakens unadaptive habits and strengthens adaptive ones.
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Can behaviour therapy be used with children and adults? If so, how might it look different for each group?
Yes, behavior therapy is used with both children and adults to address a range of issues.
Behavior Therapy with Children
Behavior therapy is tailored to the developmental level of the child. Cognitive-behavioral therapy is a common and effective approach, often involving parents in the process. Play therapy may be used to help children express feelings and thoughts. Common childhood issues addressed include academic performance, bed-wetting, and stuttering.
Behavior Therapy with Adults
Adults may undergo behavior therapy to change harmful habits or manage stress. Techniques include rational emotive therapy, neurofeedback, and relaxation training. Therapy can address issues such as smoking, alcohol abuse, insomnia, hypertension, and phobias. Systematic desensitization, aversion therapy, and reinforcement are also used.
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behaviour therapy, the application of experimentally derived principles of learning to the treatment of psychological disorders. The concept derives primarily from work of the Russian psychologist Ivan Pavlov, who published extensively in the 1920s and 1930s on the application of conditioning techniques and theories to abnormal behaviour. Behaviour-therapy techniques differ from psychiatric methods, particularly psychoanalysis, in that they are predominately symptom (behaviour) oriented and show little or no concern for unconscious processes, achieving new insight, or effecting fundamental personality change.
Behaviour therapy was popularized by the U.S. psychologist B.F. Skinner, who worked with mental patients in a Massachusetts state hospital. From his work in animal learning, Skinner found that the establishment and extinction (elimination) of responses can be determined by the way reinforcers, or rewards, are given. The pattern of reward-giving, both in time and frequency, is known as a “schedule of reinforcement.” The gradual change in behaviour in approximation of the desired result is known as “shaping.” More recent developments in behaviour therapy emphasize the adaptive nature of cognitive processes.
One of the most prominent behaviour techniques, variously known as systematic desensitization, reciprocal inhibition, extinction, or counter-conditioning, has its experimental basis in work done with animals in the 1950s by psychologists Joseph Wolpe and Arnold Lazarus. In one such experiment, cats were conditioned with electric shock to refuse to eat in a confined space. Their conditioned fear was overcome by feeding them in remotely similar situations and gradually increasing the similarity until all signs of anxiety had disappeared. When the technique, known as desensitization, is applied to human problems, patients may be asked either to imagine anxiety-producing situations or to deal with actual feared objects or situations. The construction of hierarchies of fears is perhaps the most important part of the procedure; the patient’s verbalized responses are the primary source of information, although the therapist may also rely on such other sources as diagnostic tests or interviews of family or friends of the patient. Often relaxation training is employed in the presence of the anxiety-producing stimuli. The theoretical question of whether these procedures involve reduction in the habit strength of anxiety responses or establishment of alternative, adaptive responses to the same stimuli remains unresolved.
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Much evidence has been collected to demonstrate the effectiveness of structured learning and behaviour therapy in groups. Assertiveness training is the broad term for a structured group situation that facilitates the acquisition of emotionally expressive behaviour. Such training is based on the behavioral concept that once the appropriate overt expressions of emotions are learned, practiced, and reinforced, the correlated subjective feelings will be felt.
In 1975, the U.S. psychologist Robert P. Liberman introduced assertion or personal effectiveness training as a fundamental component of the clinical services offered by community health centres.
A number of other behavioral techniques have been used in therapy. Aversion therapy causes a patient to reduce or avoid an undesirable behaviour pattern by conditioning him to associate the behaviour with an undesirable stimulus. The chief stimuli used in the therapy are electrical and chemical. In the electrical therapy, the patient is given a lightly painful shock whenever the undesirable behaviour is aroused; this method has been used in the treatment of sexual deviations. In the chemical therapy, the patient is given a drug that produces unpleasant effects, such as nausea, when combined with the undesirable behaviour; this method has been common in the treatment of alcoholism, the therapeutic drug and the alcohol together causing the nausea. Another approach reinforces desired responses with praise, food, or some other reward.
Behaviour-therapy techniques have been applied with some success to such disturbances as enuresis (bed-wetting), tics, phobias, stuttering, obsessive-compulsive behaviour, drug addiction, neurotic behaviours of “normal” persons, and some psychotic conditions. It has also been used in training the mentally retarded.
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In addition, behavioral self-control has received great academic attention, particularly learning to control the functions of the autonomic nervous system (e.g., heart rate, blood pressure, and intestinal contractions) by methods such as biofeedback (q.v.). The theory and therapy of self-control represents a significant humanistic development within the area of behaviour modification, by enhancing personal responsibility. See also behaviourism; conditioning.