The First Wave

About the lecture

In this lecture, we think about the first wave of cognitive and behavioural psychotherapies, focusing in particular on: (i) the origins of behaviourist interventions as a response to criticisms of psychoanalysis; (ii) learning theory and behaviour observation as specific responses to the nature of psychoanalytic theories being difficult to empirically study; (iii) Pavlov and Skinner as key figures in early behaviourist theories; (iv) a conditioned response, defined as a response which has been learned through experience and wasn’t present beforehand; (v) avoidance behaviours that may arise in the presence of an object or situation that has a conditioned fear response, which leads to a reduction in feelings of fear; (vi) operant conditioning as an explanation for the maintenance of phobias, due to the fear reduction in the event of avoiding the conditioned fear stimulus and the lack of experience of non-fearful incidents; (vii) the technique of behaviourist therapy to expose an individual to the stimulus that triggers a fear response in situations without a negative outcome, to extinguish the negative association; (viii) a key criticism for behavioural explanations for mental health disorders centring around the phenomenon that individuals who experience the same traumatic event respond in different ways.

About the lecturer

Dr Helen Bolderston is a senior lecturer in psychology in the Department of Psychology at Bournemouth University. Dr Bolderston’s research interests lie in acceptance-based psychotherapies, processes implicated in the development and maintenance of mental health problems, and psychological wellbeing and burnout in health and social care students and professionals. Some of Dr Bolderston’s recent publications include 'Cognitive fusion as a candidate psychological vulnerability factor for psychosis: An experimental study of acute 9-tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) intoxication' (2021) and 'Resilience and surgeons: train the individual or change the system?' (2020).