Behavioral Therapy Summary

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Chapter 4 discussed the process of behavioral therapy. There are seven steps involved in behavioral therapy to include: clarify the problem, formulating initial treatment goals, designing a target behavior, identifying maintaining conditions, designing and implementing a treatment plan, and evaluating the success of therapy and follow up assessment. The measurement of the target behavior begins after the target behavior has been designed and continues throughout the evaluation of therapy. When clients come for treatment they come with a multitude of problems, behavioral therapy narrows the client complaints to one or two problems (step 1). Conducting therapy in this manner has three advantages, the client is able to focus better, there is normally …show more content…

Acceleration is used to treat behavioral deficits and deceleration target behaviors are used to treat behavioral excesses. An acceleration target behavior is used as a substitute for a deceleration target behavior. Although, there are some requirements, it must have the same general purpose, it should be adaptive and it should be a competing response. For example, if a client is suffering from verbally talking to voices in their head, the psychologist could encourage that person to talk to other people instead. One rationale of why substituting an acceleration target behavior for a deceleration target behavior is effective is because the more the client perform the acceleration target behavior the less opportunity the client has to engage in the deceleration target behavior. Sometimes in therapy it is can be easy to tell a client what they should not do instead of telling them what they should do, to ensure that therapist do not do this they follow the dead person rule. The dead person rule is that therapists should not ask clients to do anything that a dead person can …show more content…

A treatment plan is basically what it sounds like, it is a plan of how the client’s behavior will be treated. In the treatment plan, behavioral therapists select for change those maintaining conditions, that appear to exert the greatest control and the therapeutic procedure that is most likely to modify efficiently. Due to different behavioral therapies being effective for the client's problem. The therapist describes each viable alternative therapy procedure to the client. This includes the underlying rationale, what the therapy encompasses, what the client is expected to do, and an estimate of how long the therapy will take, and the success rate of the therapy for the client's problem. In step seven and step eight, the therapist evaluates the success of the therapy. This is conducted by comparing the target behavior to the baseline. If it has not been changed then the therapist can return to one of the previous steps and correct any mistakes made. If treatment goals have been met then therapy is terminated and the therapist may set up follow up appointments. If a follow up appointment indicate that the treatment gains have not been met then more therapy is normally

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