Clinical behavior analysis (CBA) FOR EMOTIONAL BEHAVIOR

1. Clinical behavior analysis (CBA) FOR EMOTIONAL BEHAVIOR Amanda M. Muñoz-Martínez. M.A. Rochy M. Vargas Gutiérrez. M.A. ASSOCIATION FOR CONTEXTUAL BEHAVIORAL SCIENCE WASHINGTON D.C. 25 DE JULIO DE 2012

2. EMOTION AND BEHAVIORISM

3. EMOTION IN BEHAVIOR THERAPIES

4. CBA AND EMOTION • Emotional problems are the main issue for most people in clinical contexts (Friman, Hayes & Wilson, 1998; Törneke, 2010) • For instance, anxiety, depression, personality disorders, and borderline personality disorder.

5. …SO • Emotional behavior also involves the way in which people talk about respondent behavior, and how they relate thiswith other contextual cues (Bueno, 2011; Forsyth & Eifert, 1996; Pérez-Alvaréz, 2004) • IS RELATIONAL BEHAVIOR THE KEY? EMOTION ONLY INVOLVES RESPONDENT BEHAVIOR WITH PROPIOCEPTIVE AND INTEROCEPTIVE TOPOGRAPHIES

6. RELATIONAL FRAME THEORY AND EMOTION • Verbal Behavior: Direct contingencies • RFT: Derived Relational Responding • Could verbal behavior be related with emotional responses? (As proposes-Hayes & Brownstein, 1986-) • What happen when people talk about their own experience? • How respondent behavior becomes active part of derived responses and affects emotional responding? • RELATIONAL FRAME THEORY • Mutual entailment • Combinatorial entailment EMOTIONAL FUNCTION ACDQUISITION • Transformation of • stimulus function

7. RESEARCH ON EMOTIONAL FUNCTION • When one member of the relational class acquire novel functions through responding procedures, the function of the other member are transformed (Dougher, Hamilton, Fink & Harrington, 2007). • People learn emotional responses by derived relations. • For instance, when one member of the relational class is exposed to extinction procedures, the function of the other members of the relational class are transformed (Dougher, Augustons, Markham, Greenway & Wulfert, 1994).

8. …HOWEVER • These studies were conducted in controlled settings where the stimuli used were unrelated to the natural environment (p. e., nonsense words) • The major part of research about emotional functions have developed with children, and it has interested in learning process. • FACTORS IMPLICATED IN MAINTENANCE WITH ADULTS?

9. Unanswered question are:

10. …SO • It’s important to conduct studies in natural contexts, however, this could be troublesome due to the complexity of design studies that resemble the natural environment (Törneke, 2010) • Stimuli in natural context could have several function capacities, so it is difficult to know which function has been transformed or related to stimuli that are in the natural environment. • Non arbitrary relations and arbitrary relations might have been trained at the same time • NEED TRANSLATIONAL RESEARCH IN CLINICAL BEHAVIOR ANALYSIS ABOUT EMOTION

11. POSIBLE VENUES ON FUTURE RESEARCH IN NATURAL CONTEXTS • WE PROPOSE TO START WITH RESEARCH IN NON CLINICAL CONTEXTS WITH YOUNG ADULTS • USING ALTERNATIVE STRATEGIES AND HOW TO COMBINE THEM: • SELF REPORTS: it could be useful to record behaviours in vivo, from people about their own experience and contextual factors related with that • QUALITATIVE METHODS: methods such as in depth interviews, could help to gain information related with verbal behaviour • How they relate the different contextual cues with their respondent behavior and to get information about reinforcement history • Ground theory to establish frequent words and types of verbal relations that people use • Speech analysis: help to analyze words in context, (component analysis, relate verbal report with dicotomic variables) • PHYSIOLOGICAL MEASURES: take physiological measures when people talk about their behavior in emotional verbal settings and compare this with another verbal context (“neutral context”) • Use standardized stimulus that are associated with physical experience. Neutral context ( p. e., geometric pictures) • USE THESE IN CLINICAL CONTEXT

12. HYPOTHESIS FOR CBA AND THERAPEUTIC RELATIONSHIP • People with poor interaction settings have a poor emotional labels. • Affects interaction and communication repertories • People labelling and evaluating in different a manner their own experience depending on contextual keys and their own history. • People can change the manner to label their own experience, but the physiological responses are the same. • When people talk about settings that are related with changes in emotional responses this response is altered too.

13. REFERENCES • Bueno, R. (2011). Los eventos privados: del conductismo metodológico al interconductismo. UniversitasPsychologica. 10, 949-962. • Dougher, M., Augustons, E., Markham, M., Greenway, D. & Wulfert, E. (1994). The transfer of respondent eliciting and extinction functions through estimulus equivalence classes. Journal of Experimental Behavior Analysis. 62, 331-351. • Dougher, M., Hamilton, D., Fink, B., & Harrington, J. (2007).Transformation of the discriminative and eliciting functions of generalized relational stimuli. Journal of Experimental Behavior Analysis. 88, 179-197 • Forsyth, J., & Eifert, G. (1996). Thelanguage of feeling and thefeeling of anxiety: contributions of thebehaviorismstowardunderstandingthefunction-alteringeffects of language. ThePsychological Record,46 (4), 607-649. • Friman, P., Hayes, S., & Wilson, K., (1998) Why behavior analysts should study emotion: the example of anxiety. Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis, 31, 137-156. • Hayes, S. & Brownatein, A. (1986). Mentalism, behavior-behavior relations, and a behavior-analytic view of purposes of science. The behavior analyst, 9, 175-190. • Pérez, M. (2004). Contingencia y Drama. La psicología según el conductismo. Madrid: Minerva ediciones. (Capítulo 5: Las emociones desde el punto de vista conductista) • Törneke, N. (2010). Learning RFT: an introduction to Relational Frame Theory and its clinical appliactions. USA. New Harbinger Publications, Inc.