Historical Antecedents of Behavior Modification and Therapy

Description of the Strategy

Behavior modification and behavior therapy have a short history of a few decades (four or five), but a long past. It goes back to the first thoughts concerning human nature, health and illness, and mental disorders and their etiology and their treatment. In modern times, it begins with the applications of learning theory, of the procedures of classical conditioning and operant conditioning to clinical and educational problems.

This is an area of knowledge that began humbly at the end of the 1950s, but which grew tremendously in the decades of the 1980s and 1990s. Today, this has become an essential pillar; it is part of the mainstream of clinical psychology and of psychiatry, and it has changed from being ...