COMMENTARY
A unifying theoretical framework for clinical psychology
Submission date: 2018-10-16
Acceptance date: 2018-10-22
Online publication date: 2018-12-19
Publication date: 2018-12-17
Current Issues in Personality Psychology 2018;6(4):343-348
KEYWORDS
TOPICS
ABSTRACT
Clinical psychology lacks a theoretical framework through which to interpret and apply research findings. This comment explains the theoretical framework of ethology, a discipline that is extinct in the United States. Ethologists, Lorenze and Tinbergen developed behavioral systems theory as a means to place the proximal causes of behaviors within the context of adaptive goals. This comment asserts there are four adaptive goals that motivate human social behavior: attachment/affiliation, caregiving, dominance and sex. Tinbergen developed the 4 questions of ethology as a complete explanation for behavior. The articles in this volume are discussed in terms of behavioral systems theory and the 4 questions of ethology.
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Copyright: © Institute of Psychology, University of Gdansk This is an Open Access journal, all articles are distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license.
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