19 - Personality Disorders

Abstract

This chapter focuses on specific personality disorders. Many theorists assert that personality dimensions such as extraversion sit at the top of a hierarchy composed of behaviors, constructs, and traits, and that each dimension is a continuum, with problematic behaviors occurring when an individual falls too far at either end of the continuum. From a behavior analytic perspective, the concepts of traits and personality are not as useful as identifying the contextual factors maintaining an individual's behavior. A functional analytic account makes use of the principles of learning to explain how particular behavior patterns become pervasive, inflexible, and long standing. Behaviors are pervasive if they occur across a variety of contexts. This suggests that the contexts in which the behaviors occur contain similar discriminative stimuli (SDs), or that many SDs exist for a given maladaptive behavior. Frequent assessment serves to structure, evaluate, and improve an intervention. The goal of an assessment is to understand the interaction between the client and his/her environment and to illuminate the contextual variables that are influencing the target behavior. From a radical behavioral perspective, private events such as thoughts, feelings, bodily states, and behavioral urges are also considered as behavior and, thus, may be targeted and functionally analyzed in the same way as overt behavior.