As opposed to directly learnt behaviour, derived behaviour emerges when stimuli are arbitrarily related to one another in a way such that the properties of an equivalence class or a relational frame can be attested. The human ability for derived learning might explain fear and avoidance responses to stimuli that had never been directly experienced. To examine how this process works, the broad purpose of the present research was to experimentally establish derived fear and avoidance functions. Only eight experimental studies have arbitrarily established and measured both derived fear and avoidance. The present research programme aimed to expand this field of research by conducting four experiments employing fearful facial expressions as an indicator of fear, since defining fear by other means can be challenging. Experiment 1 assessed natural-language relations between fearful and happy facial expressions and words conveying fearful and happy meanings (i.e., “benchmark” condition). Experiment 2 established arbitrary relations in mutual entailment between the facial expressions and novel symbols. Experiment 3 established arbitrary relations in combinatorial entailment between the facial expressions and novel symbols, without providing participants with opportunities to derive the relations before assessing for derived relational responding. Experiment 4 was identical to Experiment 3, except that opportunities to derive the relations were provided before the assessment. These opportunities to derive relations were seen as an experimental analogue of “rumination” (i.e., repeated worrying). The experiments that established and assessed arbitrary relations employed training and testing versions of the Implicit Relational Assessment Procedure respectively to do so. The patterns of derived relational responding assessed in the training and-testing experiments were broadly the same as those observed in Experiment 1. We therefore concluded that derived fear functions were experimentally established. The derived responding patterns revealed nuances that non-relative measures of derived behaviour (e.g., matching to-sample) would not have allowed to observe. However, explicit and implicit measures of derived fear did not necessarily provide the same conclusions. Equally, avoiding the derived fearful stimuli was not associated with demonstrating derived fear. In line with previous studies, there was always an important minority of participants (usually around one quarter) who did not demonstrate derived avoidance in the presence of derived fear or vice versa. This was observed in the absence of attempts to manipulate these derived functions. We conclude for a functional separation between derived fear and avoidance.
- relational frame theory
- avoidance
- fear
- emotion
- facial expression
- psychology
Facial expression as a source of explicit and implicit symbolic fear and avoidance behaviours as moderated by rumination
Vianna de Almeida, R. (Author). Jan 2025
Student thesis: Doctoral Thesis