Acceptance and Commitment Therapy

Hi, I'm Hugo Martínez, a third-year student of the Psychology Degree in the University of Oviedo. and today (as a first informal publication) I'm going to talk about ACT .

Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) is one of the called "Contextual Therapies" or "Third Wave Generation Therapies", in which "Third wave", like you all can suspect, means another two generation therapies before it.

The first generation therapies were the direct applications of Classical Conditioning and Operant Conditioning, we are talking about Behavior Therapy, which was in part a rebellion against prevailing clinical conceptions. Early behavior therapists believed that theories should be built upon the bedrock of scientifically well-established basic principles, and that applied technologies should be well-specified and rigorously tested. In contrast, existing clinical traditions had a very poor link to scientifically established basic principles, vague specification of interventions, and weak scientific evidence in support of the impact of these interventions.

The second generation therapies were the clinical application of the "Cognitive Revolution". In the late 1960s, neo-behaviorists began to abandon simple associative concepts of learning in favor of more flexible mediational principles and mechanistic computer metaphors. The new cognitive psychology established a much more liberal theoretical approach that appealed to hypothesized internal psychological machinery.

Do you really want to know what the concept Third generation therapy involves? In this article, you can really find out what this all is about: 

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0005789416300946