Behaviour Modification

I

Introduction

Behaviour Modification, therapy used to modify or change a person's behaviour. It places great emphasis upon scientifically rigorous procedures and careful observation, and has as its basis the psychological principles of learning theory. Behaviour therapy has not been directed at analysing the underlying causes of so-called maladaptive behaviour; rather, effective treatment is aimed at only the behaviour manifested. It has since been discredited by many in the field of psychology.

II

Historical Development

As a systematic form of therapy, behaviour modification arose in the early 20th century out of a number of developments relating to the field of human learning, particularly the early work of Ivan Petrovich Pavlov on conditioned reflexes and B. F. Skinner on operant learning theory. Pavlov demonstrated that primary physiological responses or reflexes could be conditioned in animals to occur in response to external environmental stimuli. Skinner demonstrated the power of reinforcement or rewards, where a particular response to a stimulus is increased in order to encourage a certain desired behaviour. See Conditioning.

In the 1940s and 1950s, the work of the Maudsley Group (including psychologists such as M. B. Shapiro and Hans Jurgen Eysenck), based at the Institute of Psychiatry in the United Kingdom, demonstrated how behavioural methods, rather than traditional psychoanalysis (which concentrates on investigating the unconscious mind), could be used to treat mental disorders. It also applied learning theory and behavioural analysis to types of therapy.

In the United States the work of John Broadus Watson and others promoted behaviour modification as a systematic science of human behaviour, as did Joseph Wolpe in South Africa. By the 1960s a clearly definable movement of behaviour modification based upon the theories of behavioural psychology had emerged as a viable alternative to traditional forms of psychoanalytical or medical therapies.

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General Approach

Behavioural psychologists claim that human behaviour can be altered by directly manipulating the environment in which the person lives, rather than by having to bring about a change in the person's thoughts or beliefs, as traditional psychoanalytical approaches set out to achieve. Vital to this approach is the idea that the environment (unlike a person's thoughts and beliefs) can be directly observed, and that the individual can be viewed as acting in response to clearly observable stimuli or reinforcers (events or stimuli that reinforce, or strengthen, a learned response) which themselves can be altered or changed. Rather than simply focusing on the person as pathologically ill, therapists can, perhaps for the first time, think about altering the person's environment in order to bring about a positive change in the patient's behaviour.

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Techniques

Behaviour modification draws upon practices which can be described in a number of steps. These are: observation and applied behavioural analysis; formulation and hypothesis-building; intervention or treatment; and monitoring and evaluation.