3.1 Behaviourism -> how learning works

3.1 Behaviourism -> how learning works

Habituation

• When we repeatedly experience the same stimulus, our response may gradually decrease.

Sensitisation

• After repeated or intense exposure, our response may become stronger.

Clinical relevance of Habituation

• Habituation requires sufficient contact with the experience.

• If a person repeatedly escapes or avoids an emotion or feared situation, the response may remain strong — or even become more sensitive.

Experiential therapies of Habituation

• The emotion needs to be experienced, not immediately avoided, for something new to happen.

Generalisation

• a learned response spreads to other situations that are similar or related.

One of the main goals of therapy:

• Generalisation

• What is learned in therapy needs to become available outside therapy.

  • Practice between sessions helps this new learning generalise to everyday life.

Observational learning / Vicarious learning (Bandura, 1977)

• learn by observing others, without directly experiencing the consequences ourselves.

  • The therapist can become a model for the client.

Approaches perform comparably. Therapists do not. → takeaways

• Roughly 1–2% of the variation in outcome is explained by the treatment; around 5% by who is delivering it.

• That is why this unit was about you.

 "Effective" has no single definition → takeaways

• Outcome research & process research ask different questions, measure different things, & cannot substitute for each other.

• Read both kinds of paper.

Both traditions agree that the therapist is the instrument → takeaways

• Both train the same way — recorded sessions, deliberate practice, observer-rated coding.

• They disagree about what to observe: the function of your behaviour, or the client's emotional process.

Function over form → takeaways

• What matters is what a behaviour achieves, not what it looks like.

• Two clients can cry in the same session for opposite reasons.

• This applies to your behaviour as much as to theirs.

Negative reinforcement is the engine of avoidance → takeaways

• Relief that arrives when you escape.

• It works immediately and fails in the long run, which is why the pattern is so hard to break — & why the short-term column of the functional analysis matters.

Functional analysis is portable → takeaways

• It asks what a behaviour achieves, in this context, for this person.

• You can take that question into any consulting room, whatever your orientation turns out to be.