VB & RFT Focus Pack: Advanced Topics | 7 BCBA CEUs

Description

In 2001, the first book-length treatment of relational frame theory (RFT) was published. It spawned several reviews and critiques in behavior-analytic journals, including prominent ones by Mark Galizio and David Palmer. Two of the lead authors of the RFT book (Steve Hayes and Dermot Barnes-Holmes) published a response to those critiques. Then, in 2011, Jack Michael, David Palmer, and Mark Sundberg published an article on multiple control, which they assert can account for derived relations and naming. In this focus pack, you will read all of these articles to gain a better understanding of the advanced topics surrounding the analysis of complex human behavior.

This focus pack includes the following article quizzes and a 10-question final quiz:

Article Quiz: The Abstracted Operant

Read the following article (reading time: 58 min) and pass a 6-question quiz on it:

• Galizio, M. (2003). The abstracted operant: A review of the book Relational frame theory: A post-Skinnerian account of human language and cognition by S. C. Hayes, D. Barnes-Holmes, B. Roche. The Behavior Analyst, 26 (1), 159-169. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF03392074

• Abstract: Hayes, Barnes-Holmes, and Roche (2001) have edited a series of tightly integrated articles that present the relational frame theory (RFT) approach to the study of complex human behavior. The book provides a well-elaborated account of RFT and reviews the literature on stimulus relations that bears on the approach. Several articles examine extensions of RFT to a variety of issues ranging from language and cognition to psychotherapy and religion, and these provide illustrations of the comprehensiveness of the approach. Although RFT is a paradigm developed within the behavioral tradition, it is not a traditional behavioral paradigm, and thus has been controversial. Problems and puzzles in the study of stimulus relations and research directions needed for their solution are considered.
  
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Article Quiz: Data in Search of a Principle

Read the following article (reading time: 1 hr 44 min) and pass a 10-question quiz on it:

• Palmer, D.C. (2004). Data in search of a principle [Review of the book Relational frame theory: A post-Skinnerian account of human language and cognition by S.C. Hayes, D. Barnes-Holmes, B. Roche. Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior, 81 (2), 189-204. https://doi.org/10.1901/jeab.2004.81-189.

• Abstract: Responding to derived relations among stimuli and events is the subject of an accelerating research program that represents one of the major behavior analytic approaches to complex behavior. Relational Frame Theory: A Post-Skinnerian Account of Human Language and Cognition (Hayes, Barnes-Holmes, & Roche, 2001) offers a conceptual framework for this work and explores its implications for verbal behavior and a variety of other domains of complex human behavior. The authors dismiss Skinner’s interpretation of verbal behavior as unproductive and conceptually flawed and suggest a new definition and a new paradigm for the investigation of verbal phenomena. I found the empirical phenomena important but the conceptual discussion incomplete. A new principle of behavior is promised, but critical features of this principle are not offered. In the absence of an explicit principle, the theory itself is difficult to evaluate. Counterexamples suggest a role for mediating behavior, perhaps covert, thus raising the question whether a new principle is needed at all. The performance of subjects in relational frame experiments may be a mosaic of elementary behavioral units, some of which are verbal. If so, verbal behavior underlies relational behavior; it is not defined by it. I defend Skinner’s definition of verbal behavior and argue that an account of relational behavior must be integrated with Skinner’s analysis; it will not replace it.
  
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Article Quiz: Relational Operants: Processes and Implications

Read the following article (reading time: 1 hr 4 min) and pass a 6-question quiz on it:

• Hayes, S.C., & Barnes-Holmes, D. (2004). Relational operants: Processes and implications: A response to Palmer’s review of relational frame theory. Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior, 82 (2), 213- 224. https://doi.org/10.1901/jeab.2004.82-213.

• Abstract: Palmer has recently criticized Relational Frame Theory (RFT) on the grounds that it has developed data in search of a principle. In this reply, we show that he has done so by attacking fundamental concepts within behavior analysis itself, including the functional nature of an operant and contingencies of reinforcement as a behavioral process. His claim that RFT appeals to new behavioral principles to explain the development of relational operants is shown to be incorrect: As with any operant, RFT appeals to a history of contacted consistencies in contingencies across multiple exemplars to explain them. New principles only emerge later as a logically necessary extension of such operants if they exist—a view that Palmer failed to address or appreciate. Palmer’s desire to see the use of methods other than matching-to-sample is proper but already largely satisfied in the empirical literature on RFT. We show Palmer’s defense of Skinner’s definition of verbal behavior to be illogical and unresponsive to the empirical challenge behavior analysis faces. Palmer’s alternative common sense mediational associationistic account is another in more than a century of such accounts, all of which have failed empirically. At its root, Palmer’s criticism is based on a mechanistic philosophy that is hostile to a traditional functional behavior analytic approach.
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Article Quiz: The Multiple Control of Verbal Behavior

Read the following article (reading time: 1 hr 46 min) and pass a 10-question quiz on it:

• Michael, J., Palmer, D.C., & Sundberg, M.L. (2011). The multiple control of verbal behavior. The Analysis of Verbal Behavior, 27 (1), 3-22. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF03393089

• Abstract: Amid the novel terms and original analyses in Skinner’s Verbal Behavior, the importance of his discussion of multiple control is easily missed, but multiple control of verbal responses is the rule rather than the exception. In this paper we summarize and illustrate Skinner’s analysis of multiple control and introduce the terms convergent multiple control and divergent multiple control. We point out some implications for applied work and discuss examples of the role of multiple control in humor, poetry, problem solving, and recall. Joint control and conditional discrimination are discussed as special cases of multiple control. We suggest that multiple control is a useful analytic tool for interpreting virtually all complex behavior, and we consider the concepts of derived relations and naming as cases in point.
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Final Quiz

A final, 10-question quiz that encourages comparison and synthesis of the four articles.