Word: behavior
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Soon 30% of the patients were able to earn tokens for working six hours a day in jobs such as laboratory assistant or clerical worker. Just as important, unrewarded behavior-including tantrums and imaginary conversations with spirits -declined drastically. As they saved up tokens for such expensive items as trips to town, most patients began to exercise the "normal" mental processes of choice and thinking ahead...
Firmly Established. Most mental-health experts still need to be convinced. For one thing, the exhaustive follow-up studies required to assess the possible limitations of behavioral therapy are just beginning. Psychiatrists wonder how thorough and long-lasting any behavioral treatment-reinforcement or otherwise-can be. To them, "sick" or unusual behavior is a sign of underlying psychosis; no matter how many external symptoms are extinguished, they fear that the deeper problem will keep rising to the surface. Reinforcement experts answer that they have yet to see such "symptom substitution" in their patients...
...more practical level, behaviorists concede that reinforcement techniques have not so far been fully effective in teaching the full range of skills needed to cope with many daily strains. Some reinforcement experts go further and admit that behavior therapy probably cannot replace other techniques completely. Allen Bergin, a Columbia University psychologist says that "the behavioral therapist can handle a few things quite well. But what can he do when a totally depressed, alienated person comes into his office and bemoans the purposelessness of his life...
...behavioristic approach has become a sustained, potent challenge to the dominance of Freudian-influenced psychiatry. Azrin contends that "the promise that these techniques have shown in the mental hospital justifies their being tried out in every other area." In his more whimsical moments, Azrin likes to think that behavior therapy will eventually follow the paradigm of progress once proposed by Charles F. Kettering, inventor of the first successful electric automobile self-starter. "First they tell you you're wrong, and they can prove it," said Kettering. "Then they tell you you're right...
...tomorrow's nude-theater opening. An erotic renaissance (or rot, as some would have it) is upon the land. Owing to a growing climate of permissiveness?and the Pill?Americans today have more sexual freedom than any previous generation, Whatever changes have occurred in sex as behavior, the most spectacular are evident in sex as a spectator sport. What seems truly startling is not so much what Americans do but what they may see, hear and read. In those respects, the U.S. is now by far the freest country in the Western world. Moreover, it happened in a few short...