Psychological Behaviorism
Looking to the Future: PB’s Heuristic Character
Applications
 

There is a vast amount of research to be done in education and educational psychology. PB has shown how problems of education can be solved by using its principles and methods, for example, with dyslexic children. Others have used these advances in applying them to other educational problems, for example,. Sylvan Learning Systems employs methods similar to PB’s token reinforcer system and tutorial training. But much research is called for, for education does not generally use these principles or methods. Moreover, there should be specific study, within the PB framework, of what the BBRs that are learned in school—such as reading, writing, arithmetic, math—and thus how best to teach them. This basic research is not being done.

PB work provided founding pillars for the development of behavior modification, behavior therapy, behavior analysis, behavioral assessment, and cognitive behavior therapy. So, in addition to its own works, its early principles, methods, and procedures have been used many times. But PB has continued to advance greatly since those early contributions and has made many developments that establish new avenues for research and application for clinical psychology waiting to be used. To name one, PB’s framework for analyzing psychological tests in terms of the BBRs opens a vast field for development. Imagine, for example, if an intelligence test would tell the clinical child psychologist what BBRs the child was deficit in and there was knowledge by which to train the child in those BBRs such that the child’s scores would rise and the child would do better in various learning tasks. Producing those possibilities in various personality areas would enormously valuable. As another example, language, or cognitive, behavior therapy is generally accepted now but a fruitful research program on the therapy awaits full utilization of the PB theory of language that involves both classical and operant conditioning principles and various language behavior repertoires.

Continue to Looking to the Future: Unified Positivism

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