Urive Delgado Gabriela Lizzet

Group 175

Summary of “History of Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy (CBT) in Youth”

The current work is an extract of the article “History of Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy

(CBT) in Youth”¹ I’ll be talking about the most relevant abstracts of the article.

When we’re talking about cognitive-behavioral therapy there’re an amount of theories that
combined form this integrative discipline. Among all these we find respondent conditioning
theories, operant learning theory and it also incorporates cognition.

One of the often-cited examples of behavioral intervention was the “bell-and-pad”

procedure for the treatment of enuresis, it has remained a first line of treatment for enuresis,
and it did establish the way for empirically-supported treatments for mental health disorders
of youth. In a way this made a path for behavioral therapy in its earliest and went on an
approach for what would be becoming CBT at last.

The other theory that contributed to forming CBT is conditioning; this theory went, at its
time, primarily for the treatment of anxiety. It also brought the concepts of extinction,
habituation, and counterconditioning.

Operant learning establishes that behaviors are facilitated by environmental contingencies

that follow their occurrences. Therefore this theory became a key for behavioral therapy in
a way that now we could focus on the application of operant contingencies for increasing
desired behaviors and reducing undesired behaviors, establishing treatment for children
with disruptive behavior. Over time these procedures continued to be used within CBT,
behavioral therapy began to acknowledge the importance of cognition in the treatment and
became a value part of the transition to CBT.

To shoot a more effective strategy, cognitive processes became integrated with behavioral
interventions, this impacted behavior therapy with children through modeling, self-
instruction training and problem-solving. Modeling says that even in the absence of
respondent or operant contingencies, and individual can learn by viewing other person’s
behavior; self-instruction arises to teach impulsive children how to control their behavior;
and problem-solving focuses on internal thought processes as one mechanism of change.
 Urive Delgado Gabriela Lizzet

Group 175

Ultimately we can see how CBT has become the first option for the treatment of mental
health disorders in youth. This is because it provides a treatment informed by a wider set of
models, it also continues with research that is leading to constants updates in the area.

References

1. Courtney L. Benjamin, Connor M. Puleo, Cara A. Settipani, Douglas M. Brodman,

Julie M. Edmunds, Colleen M. Cummings, and Philip C. Kendall. History of
Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy (CBT) in Youth. Available from:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3077930/#FN1