Description:
This article examines the practice of operant psychology in light of its evolutionary development and its extension into other scientific fields, most notably medicine. It asks whether insistence on the primacy of behavior, empiricism, observability, and direct physical causality benchmarks of the behavioral approach-limit the application of operant models to problems of disease. Several areas of current behavioral research in which extensions of the operant paradigm have been necessary in light of new data are reviewed. A selective review of biopsychosocial research suggests that diverse variables often interact in complex or idiosyncratic patterns to affect disease expression. In some cases, biological factors limit the extent of available behavior change, whereas in other cases behavioral strategies offer the potential to modify physiological systems. Our review indicates that scientific advances call for an expanded operant approach that incorporates multicausality, indirect mechanisms of control, and multielemental analysis. Nevertheless, given the broad analytic view of the operant paradigm, it offers a rich conceptual framework for exploration of behavioral medicine issues in concert with related scientific disciplines.