Is ACT based on behavior analysis?
In a word: yes. Long ago, behavior analysis was relied on by behavior therapists to provide a model of case conceptualization and intervention (e.g., Kanfer & Grimm, 1977; Kanfer & Saslow, 1969) but that idea fell away when clinicians came to believe that behavior analysis could not deal with the issue of cognition. ACT folks were behavior analysts but they agreed that behavior analysis needed to be developed before it could work in this area. ACT, RFT, functional contextualism, and a contextual behavioral science approach was the result of years of work to change that picture. It emerged from behavior analysis, but carries that tradition forward into the experimental analysis of cognitive processes, which extends the armamentarium of behavioral principles and alters many of the key concepts in traditional behavior analysis (e.g., see Barnes-Holmes, Hayes, & Roche, 2003). What has been created in the ACT/RFT/CBS tradition is a different stream of thought within behavior analysis and a
