The use of learning theory in the psychological treatment of children.

Abstract

For some years there has been growing dissatisfaction among British clinical psychologists with psychoanalytically oriented psychotherapies. On the other hand, there has been an increasing desire to derive treatment procedures from the body of general psychological theory, in particular learning theory, which will allow of more precise formulations of problem and predictions of outcome according to the specific theoretical postulate chosen. The application of conditioning and other learning techniques in the treatment of both children and adults was, of course, described thirty years ago by M. C. Jones (5); twenty years ago, by Mowrers (8); and more recently by H.G. Jones (3, 4), Eysenck (2), Walton (11, 12) and Walton and Black (13, 14). The accommodation of theory and practice has been most fully attempted so far by Mowrer (6, 7), Dollard and Miller (1), and Shoben (9, 10).