Favor of a Treatment - Coursework Example

Surety for the scientific soundness and empirical support in favor of treatment is primarily derived from research statistics. Not many psychological interventions are investigated empirically because their proposers decline to offer them for research under the prevailing paradigms of research (The Australian Psychological Society Ltd., n.d., p. 1). The fact is; “scientific theories never become facts” (Lutus, 2013). However, the application of the theories on particular cases reported in peer-reviewed journals and other publications yields valuable results and conclusions for other users.

Intensive programs of behavioral intervention employ a variety of behavioral techniques which have to be changed along with the progress of the child and as the different areas of skill are developed (New York State Department of Health, 1999). Operant conditioning is one of the most used theories in behavioral psychology. One problem with operant conditioning exists in the comprehension and application of the process of learning. Operant conditioning tends to define the whole learning and behavior in terms of the relationship between stimuli and consequences. Such an approach is sometimes not suitable for explaining the various kinds of behaviors that the subject exhibits regardless of the stimuli.

An alternative to operant conditioning is Real Training. Real Training may be used, for example, in cases when the subject e.g. the dog has become contentious. It is the approach that imparts a need for the trainer to work with the dog to teach it the expected behavior. “To a real trainer, the idiosyncratic and unexpected responses any subject can give are the most interesting and potentially the most fruitful events in the training process” (Pryor, n.d.). Unlike operant conditioning, Real Training recognizes the difference between just knowing and actually doing. This difference may characterize a contention point instead of a lack of conditioning (Hild, 2011).