Therapy with behavioural experiments

• Behavioural experiments are planned experimental activities based on experimentation or observation. They are undertaken by patients in or between CT sessions.
• BE design is derived from cognitive formulation of the problem, and the primary purpose is to obtain new information.
• Test the validity of the patients' existing beliefs about themselves, others, and the world.
• Construct and/or test new, more adaptive beliefs.
• Contribute to the development and verification of the cognitive formulation.
• BEs provide new ways for therapists and patients to think about cognition.
• Many BEs are hypothesis-testing type.
• Patients, especially those with strongly held core beliefs, cannot necessarily identify or find evidence for more adaptive beliefs for themselves.
• On occasions, a discovery-oriented approach is used where patients have little idea what will happen when they undertake BE and need to collect data systematically.
• Identify negative thoughts/predictions when thinking about an anxiety inducing situation, writing these thoughts in a negative image column. Being really specific about what the patient thinks would happen, considering many avenues as to what contributes to the anxiety.
• Rating the Subjective Units of Distress, rating anxiety on a scale of 0-10.
• Designing a behavioural experiment, testing out negative predictions about that situation. Test out all the predictions about the anxiety inducing situations, this allows the individual to see whether the predictions are valid.
• Setting the experiment as 'homework', going away and trying the experiments.
• BE tests out negative predictions to prove negative thoughts are actually positive. Collect factual evidence and draw conclusions about the experiments, how are the initial negative predictions different from what actually happened.