The future of behavior therapy

Behavior therapy will continue to be nourished by developments in experimental psychology. The importance of cognitive and affective processes in behavior change will attract increasing attention. Treatment techniques will be refined, more widely disseminated through manuals, and extended to an ever broader range of psychiatric disorders and health problems. Clinical research will focus on comparative outcome studies, and provide probes for investigating the nature of specific disorders and the mechanisms of therapeutic change. We argue that integration of different forms of psychotherapy will depend on the development of replicable and effective treatment methods. Behavior therapy offers specific advantages in this regard.