Thinking about thinking and feeling about feeling.
Treat thoughts and feelings as behavior caused by outside events, not as hidden drivers.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Embregts (2000) wrote a theory paper. It says thoughts and feelings are not hidden causes of behavior. They are behavior themselves.
The paper tells clinicians to treat private events like any other response. Look for what happens right before them. That is the real cause.
What they found
The paper finds no evidence that thoughts push behavior like little ghosts. Instead, thoughts are just more behavior to explain.
If a client says, 'I felt anxious so I hit,' the feeling is not the engine. Something in the world triggered both the anxious words and the hit.
How this fits with other research
Meindl et al. (2023) extends this idea. They add heart-rate and EEG data to the same story. Those body signals are just more antecedents you can measure.
Moss et al. (2009) uses the same lens on motivational interviewing. They show client 'change talk' is verbal behavior shaped by prior stimuli, not a mystical decision.
La Malfa et al. (2004) looks at medication side effects the same way. A dry mouth or tremor can become a cue for new behavior, not a private feeling that rules the person.
Why it matters
Stop telling clients their thoughts control them. Say, 'Let's see what happened right before that thought.' Chart the thought like any other response. You will spot the real environmental levers you can change. This keeps your treatment plan behavioral and gives the client a clear, doable path.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Traditional clinical psychology generally posits "mental" events that differ from "behavioral" events. Mental events are not publicly observable, take place in a different dimension from overt behavior, and are the topic of primary concern. For example, mental events are often taken to be causes of troublesome overt behavior. In addition, the mental events themselves may be regarded as troublesome, independent of their relation to any specific overt behavior. Therapy is usually aimed at fixing these troublesome mental events, under an assumption that improvement in the client's status will follow in due course. Behavior analysis has its own position on the relations among clinical matters, overt behavior, and such private events as thinking and feeling. In a behavior-analytic view, private events are behavioral phenomena rather than mental phenomena. They are not initiating causes of behavior; rather, they are themselves caused by antecedent conditions, but they may contribute to discriminative control over subsequent behavior, both verbal and nonverbal. Verbal processes are viewed as vitally important in understanding troublesome behavior. However, the circumstances that cause both the troublesome private events and the troublesome behavior in the first place still need to be addressed. Finally, clinical behavior analysis will need to market its insights into diagnosis and treatment very adroitly, because it rejects the mentalism upon which most traditional forms of therapy are predicated and the mentalism that most consumers expect to encounter.
The Behavior analyst, 2000 · doi:10.1007/BF03391998