Therapeutic Approaches Essays (4369 words) - Clinical Psychology

1. Introduction Give me a dozen healthy infants, well-formed, and my own specified world to bring them up in and I?ll guarantee to take any one at random and train him to become any type of specialist I might select -- doctor, lawyer, artist, merchant-chief and, yes, even beggar-man and thief, regardless of his talents, penchants, tendencies, abilities, vocations, and race of his ancestors. ? John Watson, Behaviourism, 1930 (http://psychology.about.com/) The behavioural approach has a strong influence on our every day life, often without us realising it. Behaviour is the product of learning through conditioning, reinforcement or imitation. It is part of how we develop and grow into an individual with a unique identity. It is not only the environmental factors that influence our lives, but also our subjective interpretation of these factors. However, if one is able to control the environmental factors, it is possible to influence behaviour and even achieve what John Watson has mentioned in the quote above. Using behavioural therapy one will be able to eliminate unwanted behaviours and habits and in return develop behaviours that may enhance an individual?s life. With the setting of an orphanage the best approach will be the behavioural approach. Children come from various backgrounds, conditions, and influences. They often have very little or no routine in their lives and may also suffer from various psychological conditions. Children at a young age will respond well to behavioural methods mainly by using modelling. As they develop and reach teenage years, one will progress to a more complex method, namely cognitive behavioural method, in order to challenge them and let them understand why they engage in certain behaviours. 2. History of behaviourism Behaviourism (also known as the learning perspective) had its origin in the 1950?s, rejecting the focus on the conscious and unconscious and, instead, turned the focus to observable behaviour. It strove to make psychology more of a scientific discipline. It opposed the structuralist focus on the conscious and the functionalist focus on heredity (Skinner, 1984). The feeling was that environment determines behaviour. Therefore, behaviour can be predetermined if one can control environmental factors. Classical Conditioning The earliest form of behaviourism was by the Russian physiologist, Ivan Pavlov, and is known as Classical Conditioning, also known as instrumental conditioning. Classical conditioning is used to elicit certain behaviours from a passive organism. For example, a dog salivates (conditioned response) when it hears a bell ring (conditioned stimulus). It shows how learning can create a response through pairing. Pavlov demonstrated that through this learning process one is able to make an association between an environmental stimulus and a naturally occurring stimulus. A certain response can diminish and become extinct if the conditioned stimulus occurs repeatedly without the unconditioned stimulus. For example, if the bell rings several times without the food arriving. Eventually the dog will stop salivating whenever he hears the bell. This technique is often used to treat phobias or anxiety problems. John B Watson was one of the strongest advocates of behaviourism and he established the Psychological School of Behaviourism. He is most famous for his controversial experiment known as ?Little Albert? where he experimented the principles of classical conditioning on a young boy. Operant Conditioning Behaviourism had a very big influence on the psychological school thought and B.F. Skinner furthered this perspective by initiating what he called Operant Conditioning. Operant conditioning works on the basis that behaviour is influenced by the consequences that influence them. One will engage in behaviour that has a positive/reinforcing effect and refrain from behaviours that has no reinforcement or an aversive effect. For example, a child completes his/her homework in order to get a reward. According to Skinner behaviour cannot occur without some type of reinforcement whether it is positive or negative (Corey, 2005). This approach has the goal of identifying and controlling environmental factors that lead to behavioural change and can be used to develop pro-social and adaptive behaviours. Social Learning Theory Albert Bandura and Richard Walters developed the Social Learning Theory by using the concepts of the behavioural approach and included other approaches to make it interactional and multi-modal. It states that behaviour is influenced by an event, external reinforcement, and the cognitive process that occurs simultaneously. There is constant interaction among these three factors. This