Behavioral therapy

Behaviour therapy
Intervention
ICD-9-CM	94.33
MeSH	D001521
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Behaviour therapy is a broad term referring to psychotherapy, behaviour analytical, or a combination of the two therapies. In its broadest sense, the methods focus on either just behaviours or in combination with thoughts and feelings that might be causing them. Those who practice behaviour therapy tend to look more at specific, learned behaviours and how the environment influences those behaviours. Those who practice behaviour therapy are called behaviourists. They tend to look for treatment outcomes that are objectively measurable. Behaviour therapy does not involve one specific method but it has a wide range of techniques that can be used to treat a person's psychological problems. Behaviour therapy breaks down into four disciplines: applied behaviour analysis (ABA), the Teaching Family Model (TFM), Positive Behavior Support (PBS) and cognitive behaviour therapy (CBT). ABA focuses on the application of learning theory to assess potential behaviour-change procedures and CBT focuses on the thoughts and feelings behind mental health conditions with treatment plans in psychotherapy to lessen the issue.

Precursors of certain fundamental aspects of behaviour therapy have been identified in various ancient philosophical traditions, particularly Stoicism. For example, Wolpe and Lazarus wrote,

While the modern behavior therapist deliberately applies principles of learning to this therapeutic operations, empirical behavior therapy is probably as old as civilization – if we consider civilization as having started when man first did things to further the well-being of other men. From the time that this became a feature of human life there must have been occasions when a man complained of his ills to another who advised or persuaded him of a course of action. In a broad sense, this could be called behavior therapy whenever the behavior itself was conceived as the therapeutic agent. Ancient writings contain innumerable behavioral prescriptions that accord with this broad conception of behavior therapy.

The first use of the term behaviour 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 behaviour through reinforcement and decreasing maladaptive behaviour through extinction or punishment (with emphasis on the former). Two related terms are behaviour therapy and applied behaviour analysis. Emphasizing the empirical roots of behaviour modification, some authors consider it to be broader in scope and to subsume the other two categories of behaviour change methods. Since techniques derived from behavioural psychology tend to be the most effective in altering behaviour, most practitioners consider behaviour modification along with behaviour therapy and applied behaviour analysis to be founded in behaviourism. While behaviour modification and applied behaviour analysis typically uses interventions based on the same behavioural principles, many behaviour modifiers who are not applied behaviour analysts tend to use packages of interventions and do not conduct functional assessments before intervening.

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