Advancement Of Behavior Therapy Research Articles

Gold Medal Award for Life Achievement in Psychology in the Public Interest: Richard M. Suinn.

This award recognizes a distinguished career and enduring contribution to the application of psychology in the public interest. Richard M. Suinn has made outstanding contributions to the public interest through community service, leadership in professional affairs, and as an innovative pioneer. For the city of Fort Collins, Colorado he served as mayor guiding it to a new performing arts center architectural improvements in the downtown district, and expansion of the library. He was president of APA and the Association for Advancement of Behavior Therapy and chaired nearly every one of six APA governing boards. He has been a powerful voice toward empowerment of ethnic minorities, chairing the Board of Ethnic Minority Affairs and two major APA committees: the Commission on Ethnic Minority Recruitment, Retention and Training and the Task Force on Enhancing Diversity. Finally, he pioneered the founding of sport performance enhancement services for athletes. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

An Update on Voice Research in the United States

An Update on Voice Research in the United States

Self-Deceptive Enhancement and Family Environment: Possible Protective Factors Against Internalization of the Thin Ideal

We examined the degree to which self-deceptive enhancement and/or family environment moderated the relationship between awareness and internalization of sociocultural appearance standards. We administered the Sociocultural Attitudes Towards Appearance Questionnaire, the Family Environment Scale, the Family History of Eating questionnaire, and the Balanced Inventory of Desirable Responding to female undergraduate students (N = 232) and tested our predictions with moderator regression. Self-deceptive enhancement appeared to moderate the relationship between awareness and internalization. Family history of weight and appearance preoccupation also marginally moderated the relationship whereas general family environment did not. High levels of self-deceptive enhancement may serve as a protective factor against internalization of sociocultural pressures. High levels of family preoccupation with weight and appearance may have the opposite effect, making women more vulnerable to internalization. Portions of this paper were presented at the 2002 conference of the Association for Advancement of Behavior Therapy.

Clinical behavior analysis: Where it went wrong, how it was made good again, and why its future is so bright.

This paper traces the birth, quiescence and renaissance of clinical behavior analysis (CBA). CBA is the application of radical behaviorism to outpatient adult behavior therapy. It addresses the question of how talking in the consulting room helps the client outside of the office, in his or her daily life. The answer as formulated by CBA has led to exciting and significant developments with considerable promise for improving therapeutic interventions. A brief historical account of CBA is described that involves the interplay of three strands involving clinical applications of behaviorism: behavior therapy, applied behavior analysis, and the development of the Association for the Advancement of Behavior Therapy (AABT). These strands are traced through publications in Behavior Therapy from its inception to the present. We contend that there is a need in AABT and in behavior therapy in general for what CBA has to offer. As we see it, the major problems facing the AABT membership with its current emphasis on cognitive therapy and empirically validated treatments include the lack of a coherent theoretical base that can embrace all of the techniques used by behavior therapists. Now with all the behavioral procedures that have been developed, a horrendous question arises, When do you use which procedure for what kind of person? We conclude that far from being a thing of the past, CBA has a bright future in answering this question. Behavior analysis of the therapeutic situation offers a unique, coherent theoretical base that can embrace all techniques used by behavior therapists, including cognitive therapy strategies. ********** Clinical behavior analysis (CBA) is defined as the application of radical behaviorism (Skinner 1953, 1974) to answer the most basic question about outpatient adult behavior therapy (or any other type of psychotherapy) (Kohlenberg, Tsai & Dougher, 1993). Since outpatient treatment consists of verbal interchanges (1) between client and therapist, the question is this: what is the mechanism that explains how this talking helps the client outside of the office in his or her daily life? In this paper, we contend that CBA is an exciting, new, and significant development that holds considerable promise for improving therapeutic interventions. We also recognize that most behavior therapists are only superficially familiar, if at all, with CBA and are not aware of its considerable potential as a highly effective treatment. There are several factors that account for the relative invisibility of CBA, not least of which is its mercurial appearance over the last 46 years. THE BIRTH OF CBA In Science and Human Behavior (1953), Skinner gave an analysis of psychotherapy, including behavioral interpretations of terms such as resistance, repression, and free association. Following this work, very little was published on CBA other than the insightful, but largely ignored papers by Charles Ferster (1967, 1972a, 1972b, 1972c, 1979). Neither Ferster nor Skinner intended to devise new approaches to treatment in these writings. Instead they wrote in behavioral language, demonstrating a more useful way of describing, understanding, and in Ferster's case, teaching the change process. So, CBA got its start quite early in 1953 and then all but disappeared until its reemergence in 1987 with the publication of an edited book (Jacobson, 1987). The Jacobson book contained chapters by Hayes (1987) and Kohlenberg & Tsai (1987) that described in detail their approaches to using Skinnerian principles to treat outpatient adults. We will refer to this hiatus as the quiescent period of CBA. The reasons that behavior analysts did not pursue CBA play a role in understanding the nature of its renaissance. CBA's Quiescent Period Our historical account of CBA involves the interplay of three strands involving clinical applications of behaviorism. These are behavior therapy, applied behavior analysis, and the development of the Association for the Advancement of Behavior Therapy (AABT). …

On herding sheep and climbing sand dunes: We gotta' keep saying it (but listening too).

Cultural Change and Our Impatience for It Probably most people who strive for major changes in society or at least in their special field, are naive about how fast and easily change can be wrought. I recall that in the 1960s Ogden Lindsey was telling special education teachers at conferences that within 20 years all of special education would be behavioral. Has that come true? Well, no. Although there are probably very few special education teachers who have essentially no knowledge of behavioral techniques, the majority appear to make very limited use of a very few techniques; and even fewer have much understanding of behaviorism as a philosophy or science. Consider also this quote from M. F. Meyer in 1933: Why introduce into science an unneeded term such as when there are already scientific terms for everything we have to describe? ... I predict: the has virtually passed out of our scientific psychology today; the emotion is bound to do the same. In 1950, American psychologists will smile at both of these terms as curiosities of the past. This quote was published in a major psychology journal. He was predicting that in a mere 17 years the concept of would disappear; yet it is now 2000 and the concept has certainly not disappeared from either basic or applied psychology. I think we are all naive about how long it takes to change the thinking or action of most large populations. For example, toward the end of his career, Skinner (1987) seemed to be discouraged because psychology was not changing radically as a result of his very cogent writings about how best to conduct its science. He saw the ascendance of cognitivism and decried its negative effects on education (Skinner, 1984, 1990). He questioned whether human society--even humankind as a species--would be able to survive if we did not get the right track quickly and develop a science that provided useful answers to the severe problems caused by human behavior, such as air and water pollution, overpopulation, and war (Skinner, 1990b). It is indeed discouraging that the science of psychology seems so misguided. The same phenomenon that Skinner saw in education--with perspectives dominating and preventing the development of a truly useful understanding of how behavior works, an understanding that leads naturally to effective interventions--is evident in a field that even began as behavioral, though not behavior analytic. That field is behavior therapy. It has become increasingly over the last 25 years (Hawkins, et al., 1992). This is reflected in the fact that the organization in the United States that most represents this field--the Association for Advancement of Behavior Therapy (AABT)--added a byline to the name of its journal, Behavior Therapy, adding An International Journal Devoted to the Application of Behavioral and Cognitive Sciences to Clinical Problems. The critical word here is cognitive, and the byline was intended to reflect the existing fact that the journal publishes articles from widely discrepant conceptual and diverse methodologial viewpoints (Craighead, 1990, p. 1). In addition, in 1994 AABT began publication of an additional journal, entitled Cognitive and Behavioral Practice, in which the term cognitive is even primary. Two Major Impediments to Changing Crucial Cultural Practices Our Minority Status The first impediment is obvious: behavior analysts are a microscopic minority of the billions of people on earth. Realistically, we should not expect to change even the other behavioral sciences extensively within five or ten decades; and changing the practices of the numerous cultures throughout the world should be expected to take dozens of decades. It would appear that we must accept an evolutionary approach, not expect a revolutionary, rapid-change approach. Our Language I believe that another major reason why behavioral science has such limited impact on the practices of human cultures is that all behavioral scientists--including behavior analysts--come to their task with a host of preconceptions about how behavior works. …

Hi there! A message from founder and co-editor, Joseph Cautilli, M.Ed., M.Ed., CBA.

I remember the morning of May 30th, 1999 well ... I was in Chicago attending the 25th Annual convention for the International Association for Behavior Analysis ... and I received some frightening information: I had been elected editor of the Clinical Behavior Analyst, the newsletter of the special interest group (SIG) by the same name. This information was particularly frightening because I had never put out a newsletter before and now I was on the hook to put out three this year. Yes, three. The first newsletter is for the Association for the Advancement of Behavior Therapy (AABT). I had recently initiated a SIG that grew pretty Quickly. This group, the Behavior Analysis Special Interest Group (BASIG), has as it's mission to provide a concentrated analytic voice among voices which are more cognitive and structural. We intend to emphasize functionalism said behavioral approaches to verbal behavior. As well, we hope to highlight the importance of conducting research from a strong theoretical base, sometimes lost in the ebb and flow of blind empiricism. Some areas of interest that will be reflected in this newsletter include Clinical Behavior Analysis, Behavioral Models of Child Development, Community-based analytic interventions, and Behavioral Philosophy. With the help of my co-editor, Beth Rosenwasser (iBRosie@aol.com), Craig Allen Thomas, David Reitman, John Forsyth (forsyth@csc.albany.edu), and Duane Lundervold (dlunderv@utep.edu). I began to envision a nowsletter that would interest the members of both SIG's. I was on the hook for yet one more newsletter. This time for an important organization fostering the credentialing of analysts in the state of Pennsylvania. Like Florida, California, and soon New York, my keystone state of Pennsylvania has begun to credential analysts and has suggested such a credential for hiring into the position of behavior specialist in its Behavioral Rehabilitation Program for Children and Adolescents. In addition, many in the Intermediate Units (IU's) were in the process of pursuing certification largely to meet the needs of children with Autism spectrum disorder and language delays. This was to be a very different newsletter. The goal of the newsletter was to help credentialed analysts maintain contact and to let providers and the state know that analysts are in the community and that we have a lot to offer. Fran Warkomski (fwarkoms@cisc.k12.pa.us), from the Bureau of Special Education's Instructional Support System, played an incredible role in bringing credentialing to PA and is a big supporter of empirically supported analytic interventions. I remember talking to her and letting her know that the newsletter was designed, in part, to demonstrate that those of us in the BA community were committed to more than just Autism. BA also offers much in areas such as: Schizophrenia, disruptive disorders, and redesigning social service organizations and service delivery models in the state. I then asked my colleague at Devereux, Michael Weinberg to help. He contacted Fran and attempted to revive the efforts to build a state chapter of analysis. He also led the way in contacting Dave Feeney (DistanceEd@aol.com), head of distance learning and the behavior2000 list serve (BEHAVIOR 2000-request@LISTSERV. TEMPLEEDU) at Temple University about building a web page for the newsletter. Only time will tell if these and other endeavors will be successful in getting our message out. Well back to the convention. With the friendly encouragement I received from Robert Hawkins, Kelly Wilson, Chauncy Parker, and others, I began to think: I can do this! After all, with the help of my friend, Craig Allen Thomas, (cthomas@tclc.com), we succeeded in getting together a list serve for the child therapy SIG (AABT). …

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times

A brief history of the origins of the Association for Advancement of Behavior Therapy (AABT) is followed by a discussion of the best and worst in contemporary behavior therapy as filtered through the admittedly biased perceptions of the present writer. Next comes a presentation of several issues whose resolutions are unpredictable at this time, with possible solutions being good or bad, depending on one's point of view. The paper concludes with a discussion of the present status of behavior therapy and some speculations about future trends and long-term prognoses.

It was the age of wisdom, it is the age of hope

In a spirit of intellectual honestly, Franks (1997) provides an evaluation of the best and worst of behavior therapy from the eyes of a founding member. In so doing, he notes that conceptual and theoretical advancement of behavior therapy as a science has given way to professional advancement. In this commentary, it is agreed that behavior therapy, in its present form, is less descriptive of the actual practices of a unique group of scientists and practitioners who call themselves behavior therapists because of what they do. It is suggested that the hope of behavior therapy rests in our ability to reestablish our identity and integrity with basic behavioral principles and functional, process-oriented thinking.

A national survey of assessment and therapy techniques used by behavior therapists

The present mail survey investigated behavior therapy as it is currently practiced by members of the Association for Advancement of Behavior Therapy (AABT). Information regarding professional attitudes, assessment techniques used, problems treated, and treatment procedures utilized was obtained. The questionnaire was mailed to 964 full members of the AABT, and 334 members responded for a 34.6% rate of return. The respondents were divided into two categories based on their primary professional activities (practitioner or academic), and comparisons between these groups were made. The results were also compared to the findings of previous surveys of AABT members ( Swan & MacDonald, 1978 ; Wade, Baker, & Hartman, 1979 ). The survey results suggested a movement in recent years toward a cognitive behavioral orientation, and identified striking similarities and some differences between practitioners and academics.

AABT 28th annual convention: Association for advancement of behavior therapy

AABT 28th annual convention: Association for advancement of behavior therapy

Advances in behavior therapy

This year's review of behavior therapy and cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) highlights recent advances in treatment of anxiety disorders, depression, marital distress, chronic pain, and nicotine addiction. In anxiety disorders and depression, behavioral therapy and CBT are increasingly being evaluated in combination with or in comparison to pharmacotherapy. Follow up of 1-2 years or longer in many of the studies cited provides important information about long-term efficacy of behavioral and cognitive-behavioral interventions. In some cases it is already bringing about significant changes in the way the interventions have traditionally been used.

The World Congress of Behaviour Therapy: A Brief Report

The Fourth World Congress of Behaviour Therapy, held on the Gold Coast of Queensland, Australia between July 4–8, 1992 was an important event in the professional calendars of many behaviour therapists internationally. It was hosted by the Australian Behaviour Modification Association, in association with the Association for the Advancement of Behavior Therapy, and the European Association of Behavior Therapy. This 3-yearly event provides an important opportunity for behaviour therapists from around the world to meet, socialise, exchange information, perspectives and ideas, and establish or extend colleague networks in a multicultural context. As the first World Congress on Behaviour Therapy to be held in the southern hemisphere, it achieved the same high standard of previous congresses in Israel, Washington, and Edinburgh, producing a balanced and stimulating program addressing most of the major areas of contemporary behaviour therapy research and clinical practice.

Advances in behavior therapy: The changing face of AABT conventions

This study analyzes the content of the Annual Conventions of the Association for Advancement of Behavior Therapy for the period 1979–1990 in order to examine hypotheses about both the theoretical perspectives manifest in behavior therapy and the representation of different content areas in the field. Results indicate a strong trend away from behaviorally oriented and towards cognitively oriented presentations. Similar trends away from assessment, therapy, and professional issues and towards medical and psychopathology content were documented. Projections of the Year 2000 conference suggest that it will be neither behavioral in orientation, nor devoted to therapy issues.

Theoretical and methodological dimensions of behavior therapy: An empirical analysis

An empirical study attempted to identify theoretical and methodological dimensions of the field of behavior therapy. The similarities among 44 prominent behavior therapists were judged by 64 active members of the Association for the Advancement of Behavior Therapy (AABT). Multidimensional scaling of these similarity judgments revealed three dimensions along which these figures varied. The 3 dimensions discovered were interpreted as, (1) cognitivism vs. behaviorism, (2) research vs. clinical practice, and (3) seniority of the figures. Hierarchical clustering was used to produce a taxonomic scheme that provided an alternative grouping of the figures along conceptual and technical lines.

The Association for the Advancement of Behavior Therapy

The Association for the Advancement of Behavior Therapy

Attitudes toward Clinical Assessment by Members of the AABT

The present survey investigated the attitudes toward projective, objective, and behavioral assessment practices from members of the Association for Advancement of Behavior Therapy (AABT). Of the 531 persons in the AABT sample, 171 returned the questionnaire for a 32.2% rate of response. In terms of future emphasis it appeared that both behavioral and objective personality assessment were deemed as continuing in popularity, while projective techniques were viewed with little future utility. However, professional practitioners were expected to be familiar with standard projective measures and tests of intelligence by about half the respondents. Further, AABT members felt somewhat pessimistic about the empirical credibility of assessment techniques in general. The implications of these findings for academic and applied emphasis in clinical assessment were discussed and compared to the findings of a previous survey of AABT members by Wade, Baker, and Hartmann in 1979. The emerging practical emphasis over the past several years on behavioral assessment has not yet matured in the academic and applied setting.

Stagnation in psychotherapy and the development of active technique.

Psychoanalysis and psychoanalytically oriented psychotherapy have been practiced as primarily expectant disciplines. The patient is asked to associate freely or to talk about problems, and the analyst responds by clarifying or interpreting; the psychotherapist may, in addition, respond occasionally by advising, urging, or dissuading. Ferenczi, more than other early analysts, emphasized an active technique in psychoanalysis in which he used injunctions and prohibitions to force behavioral change for the purpose of uncovering repressed material. This technique soon fell into disrepute, considered too disruptive for psychoanalysis. Since Ferenczi most analysts have eschewed active methods. Analytically oriented therapists have sometimes used active devices, but reluctantly and unsystematically, seldom making use of recent advances in behavior therapy which could render them more effective. In this paper, after reviewing the history of active technique, I will describe an approach in which a therapist can introduce active methods into an ongoing psychoanalytically oriented therapy in a way which combines psychodynamics and behavior therapy to the enhancement of both.

Association for Advancement of Behavior Therapy

Association for Advancement of Behavior Therapy

Association for Advancement of Behavior Therapy

Association for Advancement of Behavior Therapy

Behavior therapy in practice: A national survey of behavior therapists

A mail survey investigated the characteristics of behavior therapy as practiced. Information about a variety of demographic, professional, and strategy variables was collected. Questionnaires and follow-up prompts were sent to 840 randomly selected members and associate members of the Association for Advancement of Behavior Therapy; the final sample (N=353) represented 24% of the organization's total nonstudent membership. Discrepancies between behavior therapy as represented in research and behavior therapy as reportedly practiced include: (1) likelihood of therapists to deal exclusively with presenting problems; (2) reported success rates for treated clients; (3) uses of standardized assessment procedures; and (4) the importance of relationship-enhancement methods. Implications are discussed with respect to their impact on behavior therapy as an applied science.