Relational Frame Theory

Description of the Strategy

Relational frame theory (RFT) is a comprehensive behavioral approach to human language and cognition. The theory, while based in behavior analysis and backed up by scores of human operant studies, nevertheless affirms the importance of topics that are not traditionally associated with behavior analytic research, such as thinking, feeling, planning, and reasoning. RFT differs significantly from B. F. Skinner's approach to the topic, offering an alternative operant account.

Research with verbally able humans has demonstrated that given a relationship between two novel stimuli A and B, human beings will derive a relationship between B and A, even though this relation has not been directly trained. For example, a human who has learned to pick B from an array of stimuli given the presentation of A will now be likely to pick A from an array given the presentation of B. Nonhumans do this with great difficulty, if at all (although this point has not been resolved in the literature), but even human infants 16 months of age (and perhaps younger) show this performance, which is part of a larger set of similar derived behaviors called stimulus equivalence. Humans without at least some spontaneous receptive language, however, do not show this effect, which is one of several findings that implicate derived stimulus relations as a core process in human language and cognition.

RFT research has shown that the specific relations between novel arbitrary stimuli need not be only equivalence relations, they can also be comparisons, such as “bigger than” or “better than,” or temporal relations, such as “A comes before B.” For instance, a verbally able human who is told “A is bigger than B” [Page 484]will derive “B is smaller than A” without having this relationship explicitly stated. In RFT, the derived bidirectionality of such stimulus relations is termed mutual entailment. What is crucial is that stimulus relationships of this kind are not dependent on the formal nature of the related events: They can be controlled by arbitrary cues. A dime is “bigger than” a nickel, for example, simply because the “bigger than” relation has been assigned to dimes relative to nickels by social whim and convention. The physical size of dimes relative to nickels is not what is at issue.

Relations are also derived in more complex networks of stimuli. If a human is told A = B and B = C, A = C will be readily derived. Given relational networks like “A is bigger than B” and “B is bigger than C,” human beings will also derive “A is bigger than C” and “C is smaller than A.” RFT terms these types of relations combinatorial entailment. Relational networks may be very complex and lead to a wide variety of derived stimulus relations. Since humans can then relate entire relational networks (examples include metaphor and analogy), even a few trained relations can lead to myriad derived relations.

When stimuli are framed relationally in this manner, altering the function of one stimulus may cause alterations in the other stimuli in the relational network based on the derived relation between them, a property RFT calls the transformation of stimulus functions. A commonplace example is the way that words such as anxiety may invoke a corresponding emotional response. It appears that the psychological functions associated with the emotional events transfer in part to the words that name them. The transformation of stimulus functions is itself under contextual control. For instance, all the functions of an apple do not transfer to the word apple. One can taste an apple given the written word apple, but one would be unlikely to try to eat the word.

...