Behavior therapy is a term used to describe a number of therapeutic procedures that share certain assumptions about the nature of behavioral and psychological problems and how they can best be overcome. The procedures can be classified into three main groups: fear-reduction procedures, operant conditioning procedures, and aversive techniques.

The major fear-reduction procedures consist of systematic desensitization, in which the person is trained to imagine a series of increasingly fearful images while in a state of relaxation; therapeutic modeling, in which the person observes and then imitates a therapist model engaging in increasingly close contact with the frightening object or situation; and flooding, in which the phobic person is exposed to intensely fearful stimulus situations for prolonged periods. In all of these methods, the phobic person is exposed to the real or imagined fear stimulus repeatedly and/or for prolonged periods, and in all of them...