Behavior Therapy: Definition & Techniques

By Charlie Huntington, M. A., Ph. D. Candidate
​Reviewed by Tchiki Davis, M.A., Ph.D.
Behavior therapy works only on our behaviors to improve our wellbeing. What does this look like, and how well does it work? This article will unveil the techniques of behavior therapy.
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Have you ever trained a dog, or perhaps a different species of pet, to engage in various behaviors at your command? Dogs seem to love learning the patterns through which they get rewarded with food. I have friends who have fed their dogs only through training activities – and those dogs learn fast. If you’ve ever watched a movie and seen animals doing seemingly very complex or unusual behaviors, I promise you that their trainers spent many, many hours reinforcing them for each aspect of their on-screen performance. 
And maybe you have seen a dog engage in its trained behaviors in the “wrong” situation, which is often amusing to us humans.

​You might think that this way of thinking about behavior is just for pets. However, there is a field of therapy – behavior therapy, to be exact – that operates from a similar perspective: we humans, just like other animals, have developed most of our behavioral patterns in accordance to what happens after we engage in each behavior. Let’s learn together about behavior therapy: what it is, how it’s related to other psychotherapies, and what some of its techniques are.​
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What Is Behavior Therapy? (A Definition)

Behavior therapy is a form of psychotherapy that focuses almost exclusively on what our behaviors are and how they affect our nervous systems over time (Wolpe, 1976). In other words, each of our behaviors results in us feeling either better or worse, and over time we learn to associate behaviors with those outcomes. Behavior therapy focuses on changing the behaviors that become maladaptive – they no longer get us the outcomes we actually want, but we have been conditioned to expect that they will (Eysenck, 1965).
 
It is important to state right out the gate that behavior therapy as it was originally practiced – spending hardly any time discussing thoughts and feelings, because of the assumption that behaviors underlie all the challenges in our lives – is no longer considered as effective as psychotherapies that combine a focus on behaviors with a focus on thoughts and feelings, too (Carvalho et al., 2017). The main reason for this is that there are many ways that people learn that have very little to do with their own behaviors. For example, humans and non-human animals can both do what is called vicarious or observational learning: we can watch somebody else engage in a behavior, see what the outcome is, and then try to do that behavior ourselves (Bandura & Walters, 1977).

Issue with behavior therapy approach
Another clear example that undermines the behavior therapy approach is the fact that sometimes our thinking alone causes us emotional distress. You don’t even have to act in a certain way to feel bad, because just thinking about it or imagining it can make you upset (Ellis, 1980). For example, I have had many clients in therapy who experienced shame when they merely thought about certain behaviors they characterized as selfish. (As I saw it, these behaviors would actually constitute having healthy boundaries or practicing good self-care.) But I am not immune to this pattern either – much of my own personal growth has come without changing my behaviors but rather releasing myself from self-judgment and shame when certain thoughts come up.
 
However, as I will discuss in more detail below, behavior therapy is based on a solid foundation of research showing that animals and humans can both learn and unlearn habits through conditioning, which we can define as whatever the reaction is in ourselves and our environment to our behavior (Eysenck, 1965). Where other psychotherapies may consider a client’s problems from the perspective of “what is the diagnosis?”, a behavior therapist will focus on the individual problems themselves, trying to identify how each behavior has been reinforced over time and then changing the behavior or the reinforcements for the behavior (Eysenck, 1965).​

Behavior Therapy vs Cognitive Therapy

Looking at depression can be a helpful way to understand how behavior therapy and cognitive therapy are different. For example, a behavior therapist would define a depressive behavior such as refusing to socialize with others as a conditioned response to having many experiences where, for one reason or another, the person tried to socialize and did not get positive reinforcement for it (Lewinsohn, 1974). In other words, over time, the person with depression has developed the behaviors of depression because healthier behaviors that should have been rewarding to them were not rewarding.
 
Cognitive therapy emerged in part as a response to behavior therapy (Ellis, 1980), as therapists began to realize that it was critical to discuss and work on a client’s thoughts, so a cognitive therapist would characterize depression as emerging from patterns of negative thoughts. Beck (1970) noted that, without any physical behaviors in the mix, a depressed person could activate what he called the cognitive triad: negative self-thoughts, leading to negative thoughts about the world, leading to negative expectations about the future. For example, if I think to myself, “I don’t like the way I look,” I may then have the thought, “Nobody is going to be attracted to me,” which could in turn lead to the thought, “I’m going to end up all alone.” No behaviors involved, and now I feel sad.​

How Is Behavior Therapy Different Than Psychoanalysis?

Just as cognitive therapy developed in reaction to behavior therapy, so did behavior therapy develop in reaction to the prevailing form of psychotherapy at the time: psychoanalysis (Eysenck, 1965). Simply put, many psychologists and therapists were frustrated by how hard it was to prove that the therapeutic processes of psychoanalysis, such as interpreting dreams and trying to understand a person’s unconscious, were what actually made clients feel better. So instead of focusing on things that could not be seen or proven to exist at all, this new wave of psychologists turned to the human experiences that could be clearly observed: behaviors. And in doing so, they knew they could rely on many experimental studies, with both humans and other animals, to show that their intervention techniques had tangible effects.​

History of Behavior Therapy

As I noted above, behavior therapy emerged at a time when most psychotherapists worked from Freudian theory or a psychodynamic orientation. Researchers had difficulty demonstrating that people grew from the insights they gained in Freudian therapy – in fact, in many research studies, clients did not improve more than the control group, or even got worse (Eysenck, 1965). At the same time, it was easy to prove that with the right reinforcements, you could train an animal, or a human, to do many different things, as demonstrated by the work of Russian psychologist Ivan Pavlov and American psychologists John B. Watson and Bernard F. Skinner (Lazarus, 1977). In other words, behavior therapy developed because there were clear signs that the tools of behavior therapy could work.​

Behavior Therapy Types

Behavior therapy is not practiced much with adults these days, because it is generally agreed that the psychotherapies that came after behavior therapy – those that fused the principles of behavior therapy with a focus on thoughts as well – are more effective in helping adults with mental health challenges. For example, the principles of behavior therapy, in combination with those of cognitive therapy (Beck, 1970), became the basis for therapies widely practiced today, such as Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy (CBT) and Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) (Carvalho et al., 2017).
​
However, behavior therapy continues in certain forms in therapy with children. The two main types of behavior therapy with children are called Applied Behavioral Analysis (ABA) and Parent Management Training (PMT) (Baer, 2019). The advantage of these two types is that they are helpful in situations where working with thoughts and feelings would be difficult. For example, Applied Behavioral Analysis is primarily used to help caregivers manage the behavior of children with severe behavioral challenges and children with autism spectrum disorder (Baer, 2019). Meanwhile, Parent Management Training is used to help parents become more effective at managing their children’s behaviors – for example, by learning which of a child’s behaviors to reinforce and which to avoid reinforcing.​

Behavioral Therapy Techniques

Here are a few of the core techniques of behavior therapy (Grossberg, 1964):

  1. Withdrawing positive reinforcement. One technique of behavioral therapy is the act of removing something pleasant until the desired behavior occurs. For example, a parent might withhold all attention from a child until the child engages in behavior the parent wants (such as ceasing to scream and yell and starting to put the toys away).
  2. Operant conditioning. A parent may tell a child, “You will get a sticker each time you remember to start your homework as soon as we get home from school. Once you get three stickers, we will go out for ice cream.” Over time, the rewarding nature of the stickers and ice cream will make the child more likely to start their homework promptly.
  3. Aversion. A parent may put a child in time out – an aversive experience – until they calm down and are ready to apologize to their sibling. Then, the aversive experience ends.
  4. Desensitization. A therapist and child may practice a situation the child finds difficult, such as introducing themselves to a new person, in small ways until the situation does not feel as scary.

​For more examples of how these techniques are used, I recommend watching the following video:

Video: Behavior Therapy | Psychology

Behavior Therapy Goals

The goal of behavior therapy is to increase the frequency with which a client behaves in ways that improve their life and well-being (Eysenck, 1965). It teaches clients to identify how different behaviors lead to different feelings, so they can engage in the behaviors that are healthiest for them.
 
For adults, this might look like recognizing that shutting down when their spouse tries to talk to them protects them from further shame in the moment, but leads to more shame and relationship challenges in the long run. The client might practice staying engaged in heated conversations until they have experienced the positive impacts of not fleeing the conversation.
 
For a child, behavior therapy might teach them that completing their bedtime routine smoothly is going to be more rewarding than resisting it. This can be accomplished by having the parent provide praise for each step that is successfully completed and by offering the reward of more bedtime reading time for successful compliance with the routine.​

Behavior Therapy for Anxiety

Behavior therapy has been shown to be effective for anxiety, although not as effective as Cognitive Behavior Therapy (Butler et al., 1991). This seems to be because behavior therapy is more effective for certain aspects or types of anxiety than for others. For example, having clients enter into situations they find fearful, but not allowing them to engage in their usual, maladaptive coping behaviors, can be very effective for reducing the frequency of those behaviors (Rachman, 2009). (This is how many aspects of obsessive-compulsive disorder are treated.) At the same time, it appears that for most people with anxiety, Cognitive Behavior Therapy is going to be more effective than traditional behavior therapy (Butler et al., 1991).​

Behavior Therapy for Kids

As noted above, behavior therapy continues to be effective for children (Werry & Wollersheim, 1989). The main goals of behavior therapy for kids are to decrease the frequency of unwanted behaviors (such as shoving one’s sibling), increase the frequency of wanted behaviors (such as telling the sibling you are angry), and over time, help the child learn to naturally choose the wanted behaviors instead of the unwanted ones (Gelfand & Hartmann, 1968).​

Does Behavior Therapy Work?

The simplest way to answer the question of whether behavior therapy works is that it is helpful for mental health challenges that are not strongly related to complex thoughts or emotions (Carvalho et al., 2017). For example, a child who hits their siblings when angry is primarily acting out of impulsivity and a simple (although strong) emotion; in this situation, giving the child a different, more adaptive behavioral option may be enough. For more complex issues, more complex psychotherapy is needed.​

Articles Related to Behavior Therapy

​Want to learn more? Check out these articles:

Books Related to Behavior Therapy

If you’d like to keep learning more, here are a few books that you might be interested in.

Final Thoughts on Behavior Therapy

I think learning about behavior therapy can be a great way to make small changes in your own life and big changes in the lives of your pets or children, if you have any. Behavior therapy operates from a basic set of principles that can be useful in all kinds of situations. For example, I make sure to warmly and sincerely thank every person who calls me on the phone for the fact that they reached out. Since I started doing this, I have been receiving more and more phone calls! I hope this article helps you identify a couple ways you can reinforce behaviors in your environment differently so that you can get more of what you want from your friendships and life experiences.​

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