Behavior Therapy

Behavior therapy, also called behavioural psychotherapy, is a broad approach to clinical psychotherapy that uses techniques derived from behaviourism and, in its later development, from cognitive psychology as well. It examines learned behaviors and the environmental factors that maintain them, applying principles of respondent (classical) and operant conditioning to reduce maladaptive behavior and reinforce adaptive alternatives. Emerging in the 1950s largely through the work of researchers such as Joseph Wolpe and Hans Eysenck as an alternative to psychoanalytic treatment, behavior therapy became the clinical application of behaviorist learning theory and later served as one of the two lineages, alongside cognitive therapy, that combined to form cognitive behavioral therapy.