Handbook of Brief Cognitive Behaviour Therapy
Chapter One
Brief Cognitive-Behavioral
Therapy: Definition and
Scientific Foundations
Holly Hazlett-Stevens and Michelle G. Craske
Department of Psychology, UCLA, Los Angeles, CA, USA
Over the past 50 years, cognitive-behavioral therapies (CBT) have become effective mainstream
psychosocial treatments for many emotional and behavioral problems. Behavior
therapy approaches were first developed in the 1950s when experimentally based principles
of behavior were applied to the modification of maladaptive human behavior (e.g., Wolpe,
1958; Eysenck, 1966). In the 1970s, cognitive processes were also recognized as an important
domain of psychological distress (Bandura, 1969). As a result, cognitive therapy
techniques were developed and eventually integrated with behavioral approaches to form
cognitive-behavioral treatments for a variety of psychological disorders. In this paper, we
review the evidence for brief forms of CBT across various disorders. First, we consider the
basic principles of CBT that render such therapies well ... read full excerpt from Handbook of Brief Cognitive Behaviour Therapy ebook
