In other words, in almost all cases of depression, some sort of BA intervention is appropriate. One of the strengths of behavioral activation is that it can be customized according to a person’s “values and abilities”, and can also be customized for specific types of MDD, such as comorbid MDD and a personality disorder (Cannity & Hopko, 2017 Kanter et al., 2010). Skinner’s work, and particularly his findings that “ in a given environmental context, behaviors that produce favorable outcomes will continue to occur through the process of reinforcement and those behaviors that do not produce favorable consequences will decrease over time, or extinguish” (Roane et al., 2016). Applied Behaviour Analysis: Can ABA Help Your Client?īehavioral activation is a type of applied behavior analysis, which is a field of research based on the principles of B.F. Thus, while behaviorists no longer necessarily think that positive reinforcement is the only way to treat depression, they still believe it is one of the best ways. The paper cited above (Jacobson et al., 1996) indicates that behavioral activation may even be the reason CBT is so effective. While behaviorists no longer deny the importance of cognition, they still advocate for behavioral treatments over cognitive treatments, since behaviors are easy to target than thoughts. Specifically, those researchers found that people with depression who completed BA saw as many benefits as people with depression who completed both BA and some cognitive components of CBT.
(1996) which found that to be the case is one of the main reasons people are interested in Behavioural Activation today. Interestingly, behavioral activation may even be the driving force behind the efficacy of CBT. In fact, behavioral activation has begun to be explored as a component of CBT for disorders beyond depression, such as anxiety (Boswell et al., 2017). Most modern psychological models, in general, include both cognitive and behavioral aspects, exemplified by cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT), perhaps the most common therapeutic treatment today. While some psychologists still subscribe to radical behaviorism, most modern behavioral models are not exclusively behaviorist and do include cognitive components. Since they subscribed to a behavioral model of depression, the authors believed that the best way to treat depression was to “restore an adequate schedule of positive reinforcement for the individual by changing the patient’s behavior and/or the environment”.
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