Describe one type of behavior therapy. Include information about its theoretical background, how it seeks to help people, and its key concepts

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

* Systematic desensitization is based on classical conditioning and is used to treat phobias.
* A person is gradually exposed to increasingly anxiety-provoking stimuli, either in-vivo or imagined, while practicing relaxation training.
* Aversion therapy uses unpleasant or painful stimuli to reduce or eliminate behavior by pairing it with the unpleasant stimulus and has been used to eliminate cigarette smoking, overeating, alcoholism, and sexual deviations.
* One form of aversion therapy, covert sensitization, asks the client to imagine adverse consequences of a behavior.
* Modeling is often used to treat phobias and consists of gradual contact with the feared object under controlled or protected circumstances.
* Extinction occurs when reinforcers are no longer present to maintain the behavior.
* When extinguishing behavior, one must know what is reinforcing the behavior and eliminate it.
* Punishment can be the withdrawal of a positive stimulus or the presentation of a negative one and can be quite difficult to administer effectively and is not always effective.
* A token economy is a technique in which behavior is reinforced with tokens that can be redeemed for other reinforcers.