Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT): Applying Contextual Behavioral Science to the Therapeutic Process

Abstract

Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) is a process-based approach to psychological intervention that fosters acceptance and mindfulness processes, and commitment and behavior change processes, in order to build client psychological flexibility. Psychological flexibility helps clients direct behavior toward positive habits of values based action, consciously fitting these actions to the present internal and external context, harnessing rather than avoiding or attaching oneself to historically or situationally produced private experiences such as thoughts, feelings, memories, urges, or bodily sensations that they may encounter in their daily lives. As contrasted with syndrome-focused approaches to intervention, ACT emphasizes the importance of identifying underlying processes that influence behavioral outcomes and targeting change in these processes rather than signs and symptoms of hypothesized latent disease entities. The Psychological Flexibility model upon which ACT rests is itself built upon an extensive research program on language and cognition known as Relational Frame Theory (RFT). Over 800 Randomized Controlled Trials and thousands of other basic and applied studies have now investigated the efficacy of ACT and its underlying basic and applied model, oriented toward an incredible variety of human problems and desired areas of prosperity, from mental health, to behavioral health, to social problems, to organizational issues, and high performance situations. This chapter briefly covers the underlying theory, processes, and evidence for ACT's efficacy as well as examples of how to apply ACT to human behavior change.