Behavioral Family Therapy

Key Persons: Skinner - Pavlov - Gottman - Stewart

Key Concepts:

1. Change behavior not understanding of the problem.
2. People strive to maximize rewards and minimize costs in relationships.
3. A good relationship is one where there is a balance between giving and getting.
4. Based on a linear point of view, rather than a circular point of view.
5. Four types of stimulus functions:

-         Eliciting stimuli – aspects of a situation that reliably produce a response relevant to the classical conditioning paradigm

-         Discriminating stimuli – when certain response will be followed by a particular consequence

-         Neutral stimuli – no direct relationship to behavior but can be conditioned to establish a link between previously neutral stimulus and a response

-         Reinforcing stimuli – consequences of behavior that affect the probability of a future response

6. Responses are either respondent or operant –

-         respondent are those that are under the control of eliciting stimuli and consequences do not usually affect the frequency of occurrence.

-         Operants are behaviors affected by their consequences

7. Reinforcers are consequences that affect the rate of behavior, whether accelerating (reinforcers) or decelerating (punishers)
8. Punishers can take the form of aversive control or the withdrawal of positive consequences
9. Extinction of a response occurs when no reinforcement follows a response
10. The behaviors that are the most resistant to extinction are those maintained by intermittent reinforcement

 Therapy Techniques:

1. Increase the rate of rewarding interactions by fostering positive behavior change.
2. Decrease the rate of coercion and aversive control.
3. Teach more effective communication and problem solving skills.
4. Changing dyadic rather than triadic interactions.
5. Help couples establish reinforcement reciprocity based on rewarding behavior in place of coercion.

 Therapy Strategies:

1. Using operant techniques such as shaping, token economies, contingency contracting, time out, thought stopping, RET, reattribution, self-monitoring.
2. Modeling (imitation)
3. Shaping (Successive approximation)

 Key Words:

1. Operant conditioning
2. Respondent
3. Reinforcer
4. Shaping
5. Modeling
6. Time Out
7. Token Response
8. Extinction
9. Linear causality