Conditioning is More Than Association Formation: On the Different Ways in Which Conditioning Research is Valuable for Clinical Psychology

• Main Author: Jan De Houwer
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: University of California Press 2020-01-01
• Series: Collabra: Psychology
• Subjects: conditioning; clinical psychology; psychotherapy; levels of explanation; learning
• Online Access: https://www.collabra.org/articles/239

Cognitively-oriented clinical psychologists sometimes think of conditioning as the formation of associations in memory. From this perspective, conditioning research is important because it reveals the conditions under which potentially pathogenic associations are formed and can be changed. In this paper, I point out that it is also possible and useful to think of conditioning in ways that do not refer to associations. First, based on the idea that conditioning effects are due to the formation of propositional beliefs, it is possible to appreciate that conditioning research informs us about one way of forming or revising beliefs: via the experience of events. Second, conditioning research reveals the environmental causes of behavior and behavior change and thus has merit regardless of ideas about the cognitive processes and representations that mediate conditioning. By discussing these different perspectives on conditioning as well as the way in which they are related, I hope to provide the reader with a wider appreciation of the merits of conditioning research for clinical psychology.