The BABP was founded in 1972 as an interdisciplinary Association to advance the theory and practice of behavioural psychotherapy in a wide variety of settings. Its membership includes nurses, psychologists, psychiatrists, social workers and teachers.3 The Association has lost no time in getting off the ground. The BABP was responsible for organisation of the successful conference of the European Association of Behaviour Therapy in Heathrow in July, 1974, and for its own annual conference in Leicester in April 1973, including a special national conference which it sponsored on The Psychiatric Nurse as Therapist; proceedings of the latter were published as a Special Supplement to the Nursing Times in 1973 and were distributed to members. The BABP has also sponsored many workshops and meetings round the county, and its members have been represented to the Department of Health and Social Security on two issues of major importance viz. the possible registation of psychotherapists (a questionnaire and agenda of a meeting are enclosed with this newsletter) and the ethics of behavioural treatments.

One aspect of behaviour therapy research that has been surprisingly slow to develop is the prediction of outcome from individual differences. In most other ways (the formulation of treatment methods precisely enough for them to be replicable, the controlled evaluation of treatment efficacy, the investigation of procedural variations which are of theoretical importance etc.) behaviour therapy research is relatively advanced. But curiously, the prediction outcome is much less well investigated than it is in some other treatment fields such as rehabilitation, which are in other ways at a lower level of scientific development than behaviour therapy.

The large number of recent reviews testify to the importance of modelling in the experimental and clinical literature on behaviour modification (Bandura, 1969, 1971; Flanders, 1968; Goldstein, 1973; Rachman, 1972, 1975).The initial resurgence of interest has been, without doubt, largely due to Bandura's experimental investigations of imitation learning, and his assignment of modelling to a central role in his social learning theory (Bandura, 1971). He and his colleagues have demonstrated the importance of modelling in such diverse areas as aggression, anxiety-reduction, self-control and the acquisition of moral judgements. In very recent years there has been a veritable explosion of studies with direct or indirect relevance to a clinical population. This is exemplified in the two reviews conducted by Rachman. Prior to 1972, seventeen experimental investigations had appeared. In the next two years a further twenty-six studies were reported (Rachman, 1972, 1975).