A BEHAVIOR ANALYTIC INTERPRETATION OF ATTRIBUTIONS IN THE CONTEXT OF BEHAVIOR-THERAPY

Clients often provide reasons, justifications, and explanations (i.e., attributions) about me causes of their problems and what they believe needs to be done to ameliorate them. Behavior therapists also frequen tly generate hypotheses about causal factors contributing to client be havior problems. We discuss the function of attributing in the context of behavior therapy and interpret the cognitive construct of attribut ions from a behavior analytic perspective as a verbal act of relating otherwise arbitrary events with origins in a social-verbal community. The applied implications of our interpretive analysis of attributions and their role in client problems suggest different therapeutic strate gies. (C) 1997 Elsevier Science Ltd.