Association for Behavior Analysis International

While behavior analysis has far-reaching implications for behavior and cultural change, disseminating and implementing those principles in more diverse settings has met with several stumbling blocks. Among those are scaling the application of principles to large units such as communities and altering cultural practices. Additionally, disseminating principles to primary service providers has sometimes made use of terminology and practices that are removed from the basic science. This symposium will address the how translating our basic science to the application of behavior change at multiple levels might occur with more scope and fidelity.

It is always important but difficult to identify the core principles on which any therapy or clinical intervention is entirely based and this task is even greater in the context of whole therapeutic regimes or packages. However, this endeavor is particularly important for behavior therapies, that are meant to be rooted in behavioral principles, if not directly supported by empirical evidence. But, there are limited discussions of this issue and thus third wave behavior therapies are acutely at risk of slipping away from their behavioral roots. This situation would be good neither for the therapy, nor for behavior analysis in general. This paper explores the difficulties inherent in anchoring any third wave behavior therapy package to its behavioral roots and discusses the situation in ACT in particular

Behavioral therapies have demonstrated along year a strong effectiveness in psychological treatments (APA, 2015). However, there are an important number of therapies, whose explanatory mechanisms do not have a clear bond with well-developed theoretical principles (Kazdin, 2007; Rosen & Davison, 2003). Therefore, explanations about why those therapies work are hardly known. Clinical Behavior Analysis (CBA) is a behavioral approach to traditional psychotherapy (Guinther & Dougher, 2013), whose goal is integrating principles from behavioral traditions to clinical practice. One of the therapies developed within CBA is Functional Analytic Psychotherapy (FAP). According to FAP, therapist-client interaction in session promotes changes out-of-session. Here, therapist sets the context for producing change in-session (discriminative stimulus for clients problems and improvements) and delivers consequences (e.g. reinforcing, punishing). However, some FAP researches developed therapeutic strategies, whose connection with behavioral principles is unclear (e.g. ACL FAP model), loosing precision on treatment when they use middle-level terms to explain change. This presentation seeks showing the current state of FAP research based on behavioral principles, the problems of using middle level terms for a coherent therapeutic approach, and the importance of strengthen FAP translational studies to establish the relation between behavioral principles and practice instead to adopt fuzzy explanatory terms.