Behavior modification

Behavior modification is based on methodological behaviorism, which refers to limiting behavior-change procedures to behaviors that are observable and was employed briefly during the late 1950s but predominately from the late 1970s to early 1980s. Specifically, behavior was modified through the use of presumed consequences, including positive and negative reinforcement contingencies to increase desirable behavior or by administering extinction and/or punishment to reduce behavior.

In contrast to behavior analysis, analyzing the behavior-environment interactions (including antecedent stimuli) was not considered relevant in behavior modification; it also lacked the conceptual piece (radical behaviorism) initially purposed by B. F. Skinner. Subsequently, applied behavior analysis (ABA) has superseded the early term behavior modification since the 1990s.

The first use of the term behavior modification appears to have been by Edward Thorndike in 1911. His article Provisional Laws of Acquired Behavior or Learning makes frequent use of the term "modifying behavior". Through early research in the 1940s and the 1950s the term was used by Joseph Wolpe's research group. The experimental tradition in clinical psychology used it to refer to psycho-therapeutic techniques derived from empirical research. It has since come to refer mainly to techniques for increasing adaptive behavior through reinforcement and decreasing maladaptive behavior through extinction or punishment (with emphasis on the former). Emphasizing the empirical roots of behavior modification, some authors consider it to be broader in scope and to subsume the other two categories of behavior change methods.

In recent years, the concept of punishment has had many critics, though these criticisms tend not to apply to negative punishment (time-outs) and usually apply to the addition of some aversive event. The use of positive punishment by board certified behavior analysts is restricted to extreme circumstances when all other forms of treatment have failed and when the behavior to be modified is a danger to the person or to others (see professional practice of behavior analysis). In clinical settings positive punishment is usually restricted to using a spray bottle filled with water as an aversive event. When misused, more aversive punishment can lead to affective (emotional) disorders, as well as to the receiver of the punishment increasingly trying to avoid the punishment (i.e., "not get caught").

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