7.9: Chapter Recap

In Module 7, we discussed a willingness to change from the perspective of DiClimente’s process of change. We also discussed self-efficacy and how believing in ourselves will make success more likely. Of course, success is never guaranteed and everyone makes mistakes or gives in to temptation. These lost battles do not mean the war is lost though.

We then discussed the need to precisely define our target and competing behaviors. Once a precise definition is in place, we can formulate goals for how much we wish for the behavior to increase or decrease. We can also set short term or proximal goals to help us achieve the much larger or distal goal. Think about writing a 10-page paper. It is easier to say I am going to write the first section today, the next tomorrow, and then the final section the day after. Then I will revise and edit and print the paper to be submitted. These subgoals make the much larger task more manageable and easier to achieve. As this works with writing a paper, so too it can work with changing behavior.

Next, we discussed ways to collect data about the behavior, what causes it, and what maintains it. The baseline phase is when we record occurrences of the behavior before any manipulation/strategies are employed. From this we conduct a functional assessment and discussed what information we can gain from it. We also had a discussion of temptations and what to do about them.

We discussed the strategies used to change an unwanted behavior or to establish a new behavior. These focused on the antecedent and included goal setting, antecedent manipulations, discrimination and generalization, prompting and fading, self-instructions, and social support. Then we discussed the behavior focused strategies of shaping, fear and anxiety procedures, habit reversal, and cognitive behavior modification. We finished up by discussing consequence focused strategies focusing on the use of reinforcement and punishment. Some of these strategies were covered in this module and others in Module 6.

As we winded down Module 7, we discussed the important issue of evaluating the plan and making adjustments as needed. Finally, we discussed the final stage of our behavior modification plan — maintenance. Knowing when to move to this stage is half the battle and the other half is knowing what to do when we have maintenance or transfer issues. Our bad behavior will rear its ugly head and this is to be expected, but what we need to do is prevent it from becoming the norm and not the exception. This is where relapse prevention comes in. Effective stress management can go a long way to helping us to avoid tempting people, things, situations, and environments, and to allow rational processes to govern our behavior.

So that’s it. Module 7 showed the applied side of learning theory as it relates to operant conditioning. Our discussion did cover a few strategies related to respondent conditioning (covered earlier in the book) and observational learning (covered in Module 8).

This concludes Part III and our discussion of the form of associative learning called operant conditioning.