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behaviors through role-playing in structured situations. The therapist helps the client by providing positive reinforcement and corrective feedback. Shaping involves reinforcement of more and more complex social situations. Through social skills training, people with social phobias learn to make friends or date, and former mental patients learn to deal normally with people outside of the hospital. Biofeedback training is a widely used behavioral therapy that involves giving the individual immediate information about the degree to which he/she is able to change anxiety-related responses such as heart rate, muscle tension, and skin temperature to facilitate improved control of the physiological process and, therefore, lessen physiological arousal.

Behavior therapies have been found effective for treating anxiety disorders (generalized anxiety disorder, panic disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder), alcohol and drug addictions, bed-wetting, sexual dysfunctions, and autism.

Psychoanalysts discount the quick cure offered by behaviorists. Since behaviorists are unconcerned with the cause of anxiety, analysts believe that it will resurface in a new form. Until the unconscious conflict is made conscious, the behaviorist is only “curing” the symptom of the problem; so through symptom substitution, a new problem will occur. The so-called cured smoker suddenly begins another compulsive habit, like eating or drinking.

Cognitive-Behavioral Approaches

Cognitive therapists, sometimes called cognitive-behavioral therapists, think that abnormal behavior is the result of faulty thought patterns. Many psychologists consider cognitive therapy to be an insight therapy. Cognitive-behavior therapy helps clients change both the way they think and the way they behave. Through cognitive restructuring, or turning the faulty, disordered thoughts into more realistic thoughts, the client may change abnormal behavior.

Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy

Albert Ellis developed Rational Emotive Therapy (RET), which is also called rational emotive behavior therapy (REBT), based on the idea that anxiety, guilt, depression, and other psychological problems result from self-defeating thoughts. The therapist has the client confront irrational thoughts by discussing his/her actions, his/her beliefs about those actions, and finally the consequences of those beliefs. The actions, beliefs, and consequences he called the ABCs of treatment. For instance, a young man is feeling guilty about not having helped his mother more before she died. Ellis might have confronted this guilty belief with a statement like “And you were the only person in the entire universe who could have helped her, right?” While defending these beliefs, the client may see how absurd they truly are. Ellis believed that much of this thinking involves the tyranny of the “shoulds,” what we believe we must do, rather than what is actually realistic or necessary.

Cognitive Triad Therapy

Aaron Beck also developed a cognitive therapy to alleviate faulty and negative thoughts. His cognitive triad looks at what a person thinks about his/her Self, his/her World, and his/her Future. Depressed individuals tend to have negative perceptions in all three areas. As noted by Martin Seligman, depressed individuals tend to think they caused the negative events, the negative events will affect everything they do, and the negative events will last forever. Such thoughts and beliefs lead to low self-esteem, depression, and anxiety. The goal of therapy is to help them change these irrationally negative beliefs into more positive and realistic views. Failures are attributed to things outside their control and successes are seen as personal accomplishments. Beck suggests specific tactics, including evaluating the evidence the client has for and against automatic thoughts, reattributing the blame to situational factors rather than the client’s incompetence, and discussing alternative solutions to the problem. For example, instead of blaming yourself for being stupid when the entire