Behavior Theory and Therapy
A. Biography of The Major Contributor of Behavior Theory and Therapy
The second significant influence in the fields of psychology and psychotherapy is
behavior therapy, along with cognitive therapy. The area of psychotherapy has been
greatly influenced by behavior therapy. Behavior therapy methods were first developed in
the late 1950s and were based on B. F. Skinner's operant conditioning studies and Ivan
Pavlov's theory of classical conditioning. Joseph Wolpe's research on anxiety hierarchies,
relaxation, and desensitization, as well as Donald Meichenbaum's creation of self-
instructional learning and stress inoculation, are examples of later advancements in
behavior therapy. Early on, a radical minority movement called behavior therapy
emerged to oppose the then-dominant psychoanalytic school of psychotherapy. Since
then, a lot has changed. The various psychotherapies discussed in this book and
behavioral treatments have important differences.
Animal experiments conducted in physiology and experimental psychology labs
provided the foundation for the development of behavior therapies. The clinical practice
of therapists dealing with clients led to the development of existential-humanistic and
psychodynamic therapies. Although client learning is a cornerstone of all
psychotherapies, behavioral approaches to therapy are distinguished by their emphasis on
learning principles. The movement to include cognitive effects in behavior therapy was
perhaps one of its most important developments. The cognitive behavioral school of
psychotherapy has replaced the previous behavioral school as its name. Behaviorists are
now more likely than ever to refer to themselves as cognitive behavioral therapists rather
than as simple behaviorists. The decision to rename the Association for Advancement of
Behavioral Therapy (AABT) as the Association for Behavioral and Cognitive Therapies
(ABCT) in 2005 helped to formalize this transformation. Whether behavior therapy will
continue to be used as a solely behavioral approach to therapy or if it will eventually be
included under the broad heading of cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) is still up in the
air. Below are the major contributor of behavior theory and therapy:
1. John Watson
A prominent supporter of the behavioral school was John B. Watson. Watson
argues that behaviorists focus on observable animal and human behaviors
rather than elusive mental processes. With the help of Rayner, his graduate
assistant, and Albert B ("Little Albert"), an 11-month-old baby, Watson
conducted one of his most well-known experiments. The youngster was taught
to fear rats and other hairy animals by him and Rayner. Little Albert was
placed near a white rat, and when he reached for it, they made a loud noise to
scare him away. They performed this series of events repeatedly, training
Albert to sob whenever he saw the rat. Albert developed an association
between the frightening noise and anything furry, including dogs, bunnies, fur
coats, and cotton balls as a result of conditioning. Human emotions can be
learnt and generalized, according to Watson and Rayner's research. Albert, a
young child, associated rats with all white, fuzzy objects. Today, the
experiment's ethics are frequently questioned, in part because Albert's fear
was never deconditioned.
2. B. F. Skinner
In Susquehanna, a little railroad community in Pennsylvania near the New
York state line, Frederic Skinner was born on March 20, 1904. He was the
older son of William Arthur Skinner and Grace Madge Skinner. His only
sibling, who was two years younger than him, passed away unexpectedly
when he was 16 years old. Skinner's mother had strict moral standards and his
father was a lawyer. Except for cleaning his mouth out with soap when he
cursed, his parents hardly ever physically corrected him. Skinner thought his
parents' punishment methods were reasonable and effective. The operant
conditioning hypothesis was created by Skinner, who postulated that action is
governed by its consequence—reinforcements or penalties that increase or
decrease the likelihood that the behavior will recur. The treatment of phobias,
the management of compulsive behaviors, and computer-based learning all
still use the principles of operant conditioning. According to Skinner, studying
external (external) behavioral patterns rather than interior (subjective) mental
processes is the only way to study psychology in a scientific manner.
3. Joseph Wolpe
Joseph Wolpe, the son of Michael Salmon and Sarah Millner Wolpe, was born
on April 20, 1915, in Johannesburg, South Africa. He later on in life acquired
US citizenship. The behavioral technique of systematic desensitization, which
involved creating a hierarchy of anxiety-provoking situations, learning
relaxation techniques, and eventually learning to associate a previously
anxiety-provoking situation with relaxation, was developed by Wolpe. This is
one of the main contributions of Wolpe. His initial studies involved cats that
received brief electric shocks along with particular noises and visual cues. The
messages induced dread in the cats after they connected the unpleasant jolt
with these visuals or noises. Wolpe sought to demonstrate that we might
overcome our fears. The same sights and sounds were progressively
introduced to the cats, but this time he fed them instead of shocking them.
When these sights and noises were combined with food, the cats' dread of
them gradually "unlearned."
4. Donald Meichenbaum
One of the key people behind behavior therapy's shift to the current cognitive
behavioral approach is Donald Meichenbaum. According to Meichenbaum, he
is credited with creating the concepts of stress inoculation, self-management,
and self-instructional learning. He advocated for self-instructional training as
a way for people to learn how to handle situations that had previously caused
them difficulty. Anger, anxiety, eating disorders, addiction, and obstacles to
creative expression have all been treated via self-instructional training.
Assertiveness training has also used it.
B. Theory of Personality
The foundation of the behavioral theory of personality is the learning theory of
learning, which holds that all behaviors are learned and conditioned. Behaviorists, in
contrast to psychoanalytic and psychodynamic theorists of personality, are hesitant to
offer explanations of an individual's "personality." Behaviorists are wary of speculating
on the origins of a particular behavior pattern in the absence of any supporting evidence.
The so-called mental or intra-psychic workings of an individual are not given explanatory
or causal status by behaviorists. According to Skinner, "a self or personality is at most a
repertory of conduct supplied by an organized collection of conditions." Behaviorists
view personality as the unique set of responses an individual has to various stimuli.
1. Classical Conditioning
Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov performed the initial tests and coined the
term "classical conditioning." When Pavlov saw that dogs salivated when they
saw food, he concluded that many animals had this response hardwired into
them to aid with digestion. The food served as the unconditioned stimulus
(UCS) and salivation was the unconditioned response in Pavlov's experiment
(UCR). The dogs' salivation (UCR) was automatically brought on by the sight
of the meal (UCS). Pavlov noticed that over time, when he introduced or
combined a new stimulus—such as the sound of a bell ringing—with the
presentation of food (the UCS), the new stimulus caused the same reaction
(dogs salivating) as the UCS (the presentation of the food itself). When the
bell's ringing preceded the introduction of the food and trained the dog to
salivate, Pavlov designated the new stimulus—the bell's ringing—as a
conditioned stimulus (CS). He described the dogs' salivation in response to the
sound of the bell as a conditioned reaction (CR). When a dog drools after
spotting a dog bone or steak, the steak represents the UCS, and the salivation
represents the UCR. That example, when they see a juicy dog bone or a rib
eye steak, dogs begin to salivate naturally. Normally, dogs don't drool at the
sound of a ringing bell. If a bell is consistently rung each time a dog is
presented with a steak, the dog eventually learns to salivate upon hearing the
bell. Associative learning is a kind of classical conditioning. In other words, if
the CS and UCS are combined regularly, the two stimuli get connected, and
the person or animal responds behaviorally to the CS. In the second case, the
dog's salivation in response to the sound of the bell is the CR and the bell
serves as the CS by alerting the dog that food is on the way.
2. Operant Conditioning
Two American psychologists, Edward Thorndike and B. F. Skinner, are
credited with developing the idea of operant conditioning. Around the same
time that Pavlov concluded his renowned studies in 1911, Thorndike carried
out experiments to explore learning. In contrast to Pavlov, Thorndike
conducted his tests on cats. After putting food outside a cage, he saw how a
cat would try to open a latch to get out of the cage and get the food. The cat
first managed to escape the cage through trial and error. The cat became
increasingly adept at escaping as the experiment was repeated. Thorndike
drew a learning curve that represented the amount of time required to press
the latch. Thorndike established the law of effect, which states that "results of
conduct assist in understanding the causes of those results." Operant
conditioning happens when a behavior is followed by a consequence, and the
nature of the result modifies a person's or an organism's propensity to repeat
the behavior in the future. The premise is that we receive rewards or penalties
for our activities, and that by doing so, we develop the ability to distinguish
between actions that result in rewards and those that do not. When we are
rewarded, we are more likely to do so, and when we are penalized or not
reinforced, we are more prone to do otherwise.
3. Reinforcement
Reinforcement in behavior therapy refers to the process of making a behavior
more persistent. It describes any input that strengthens or raises the probability
of a particular response from a person. By providing a stimulus right away
after a reaction or behavior is displayed, reinforcement helps to enhance the
likelihood that a particular behavior will occur in the future. Positive,
negative, and punitive reinforcement are the three fundamental forms. Positive
reinforcement can be envisioned as adding something to boost a reaction. For
instance, a man is more likely to keep cutting the grass if he receives
compliments on the outstanding job he does. Praise and rewards are the two
most popular forms of positive reinforcement. We applaud kids who achieve
high academic standards. Negative reinforcement, on the other hand, occurs
when a specific stimulus is taken away after a particular behavior is displayed.
This stimulus is typically an aversive one. It entails taking something away in
order to boost a response. By eliminating or avoiding the negative
consequence, the likelihood that a behavior will occur again in the future is
raised. Negative reinforcement is not the same thing as a punishment method.
Punishment reduces the likelihood that a person would display a particular
behavior, but negative reinforcement increases the likelihood of the
occurrence of a behavior.
4. Counterconditioning
A strategy called counterconditioning involves introducing a second CR (such
as approaching a snake) with the explicit goal of negating or counteracting a
previously acquired or conditioned reaction, such as aversion to snakes.
Desensitization is a particular kind of counterconditioning method that is
covered in greater detail in the Wolpe section. The fundamental tenet is that if
worry can be conditioned, it can also be deconditioned through a process
called counterconditioning.
C. The Therapeutic Process
The focus of behavior therapy is on changing and taking control of undesirable
habits. Those who seek behavior therapy frequently wish to increase or eliminate a
certain behavior that they have either too little of or too much of. The following
viewpoints define the behavioral theorist's worldview:
- Clients' observable behavior and life responses should be the main focus of
counseling and psychotherapy, not their unresolved, unconscious problems,
which behaviorists contend cannot be adequately examined or characterized.
- Understanding and modifying a client's behavior begins with learning. In
behavior therapy, a client's learning is meticulously planned out. Unlike to
other psychotherapists, behavior therapists frequently instruct their patients to
carry out activities like relaxation exercises, calorie counting, abstaining from
obsessive rituals, or facing anxiety-inducing circumstances.
- Contingencies also control how we learn. As clients learn correlations
between event sequences and their behaviors, a process called as association
learning, they change their behavior. Behavior therapists prioritize the client's
activities outside of therapy in contrast to psychodynamic therapists.
Behaviorists can be innovative in how they apply the approaches as they create
counseling protocols specifically for a given client. Lazarus, one of the founders of
modern clinical behavior therapy, asserts that behavioral physicians can include any
strategy that can be demonstrated to change behavior effectively in their treatment
programs. The strategies used in behavioral therapy, including as flooding, reciprocal
inhibition and systematic desensitization training.
1. Flooding
Flooding therapy involves extended exposure to anxiety-provoking events in
real life or in the mind. Similar to desensitization, flooding is based on similar
principles. Clients' relief at not having to face a scary circumstance reinforces
their decision to avoid it. According to Flooding, anxiety cannot be maintained
when exposed to a situation repeatedly or over extended periods of time
without experiencing any genuine negative effects. In flooding therapy, the
therapist exposes the patient to the most intense safe variation of the
frightening stimuli. The client's fear reaction burns down as a result of the
flooding or high exposure to the stimuli, and extinction follows.
2. Relaxation Training Techniques
The progressive relaxation technique, which calls for therapists to instruct
patients on how to relax the muscles throughout their bodies, was created by
Jacobson in 1938. The fundamental idea behind progressive relaxation
training is that tension in the muscles makes people more anxious. Clients are
taught by therapists how to distinguish between when their muscles are totally
relaxed and when they are fully tensed. Clients minimize tension in their
bodies when they learn to distinguish between tense and relaxed muscle
groups and to relax muscles when instructed to do so. They start to
comprehend tension better and learn techniques for managing it.
3. Reciprocal Inhibition and Systematic Desensitization
A behavioral method known as reciprocal inhibition is based on the idea that
one reaction can be inhibited by the appearance of another response that is
incompatible with it. When clients are encouraged to employ deep breathing
and muscular relaxation techniques in response to anxiety-inducing and
frightful events, relaxation training uses the reciprocal inhibition principles.
The pairing of a neutral event or stimulus with a stimulus that already causes
dread is known as systematic desensitization. Desensitization techniques that
help clients gradually lose their fear include counterconditioning, reciprocal
inhibition, and response replacement. Clients with a range of phobias, such as
an unreasonable fear of heights, objects, or animals, and who experience
increased anxiety and tension in social circumstances are treated with
systematic desensitization approaches.
