Los Procesos De Condicionamiento Clásico En La Interacción Verbal Terapéutica

Abstract

The study of verbal interaction in therapy from a behavioral perspective has been focusing for many years on operant conditioning processes when explaining clinical change. However, research seems to suggest that Pavlovian processes also can be valuable in understanding verbal behavior. From this standpoint, this study identified the pavlovian processes involved in the verbalizations of therapists through 55 sessions of therapy, and then related them with changes in the verbalizations of clients with different problems as the therapy progressed. Verbal behavior used as a conditioning mechanism is related to the client’s verbal behavior with a significance level of p = .01 and a goodness-of-fit of R² = .64. This seems to support that including classical conditioning processes in the study of verbal behavior could help fill the gaps in the conceptual framework of the therapeutic verbal interaction, and potentially, contribute to an explanation of how the learning processes that occur in the clinical setting are transferred to the client’s everyday environment.