Description of the Strategy

Response prevention refers to a practice in which a learned behavioral reaction to a stimulus or event is blocked or inhibited. The purpose of response prevention is to break the association between the learned behavioral reaction, which typically is one that is harmful or maladaptive in the case of response prevention, and the antecedent or consequent events that maintain the response. Decades of theoretical and empirical work on the principles of associative learning have demonstrated that behaviors are influenced by the events that precede and follow them and that adding, removing, or changing these events will modify behaviors. In some instances, however, it is not possible or desirable to change the antecedent or consequent events. Therefore, it may be ...