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A Commentary on the Dynamics of Arbitrarily Applicable Relational Responding Involving Positive Valenced Stimuli and its Implications for the IRAP Research

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Abstract

The Implicit Relational Assessment Procedure (IRAP) has been successfully used to analyze the strength of symbolic relations. Taking advantage of this, Bortoloti, de Almeida, de Almeida, and de Rose (Frontiers in Psychology, 10(954), 2019) reported a higher relational strength in equivalence classes containing happy faces than in those containing negative faces. This so-called happiness superiority effect (HSE) was inferred from an IRAP that included stimuli presented during the equivalence training. Such HSE apparently had a stronger influence on IRAP performance than the equivalence training itself. In this article, we comment on these data and present a new analysis that supports a hypothesis raised by Bortoloti et al. (Frontiers in Psychology, 10(954), 2019) to account for a surprising IRAP performance in their experiment. Based on this, we discuss new avenues for the investigation of properties of relational responding using the IRAP.

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Fig. 1.
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Notes

  1. It is important to highlight that the DAARRE model is not a formal hypothetico-deductive structure; rather it remains a work in progress and can be viewed as a tool for inductive behavior-analytic research.

  2. Indeed, recently Barnes-Holmes, Barnes-Holmes, and McEnteggart (2020) integrated the DAARRE model with the Multidimensional Multilevel (MDML) framework, giving rise to the Hyperdimensional Multilevel (HDML) framework, and thus generated a new core unit of conceptual analysis which they referred to as the Relation, Orienting and Evoking (ROE) model (see Barnes-Holmes et al. for more details about this new unit of conceptual analysis, which is beyond the scope of this article).

  3. Finn and Barnes-Holmes (2019) reported that in some IRAP arrangements participants may find it easier to select a response option that is functionally similar to the target stimulus than a response option that is dissimilar. The authors referred to this effect as Dissonant Target Trial Type Effect (DTTTE, see also Kavanagh et al., 2019). We argue next that this may have been the case with the happy targets and the "true" response option.

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Acknowledgments

We thank Dermot Barnes-Holmes and an anonymous reviewer for careful comments on the first version of this article.

Availability of Data and Materials

Data supporting the findings presented in this article can be found at https://osf.io/wuvm6/.

Funding

This work was part of the research program of Instituto Nacional de Ciência e Tecnologia sobre Comportamento, Cognição e Ensino (National Institute of Science and Technology on Behavior, Cognition, and Teaching), under the leadership of Deisy G. de Souza and supported by the São Paulo Research Foundation (FAPESP, Grant # 2014/50909-8) and Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico (CNPq, Grant # 465686/2014-1).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, Belo Horizonte, Brazil

    Renato Bortoloti & Rodrigo Vianna de Almeida

  2. Instituto Nacional de Ciência e Tecnologia sobre Comportamento, Cognição e Ensino (INCT-ECCE), São Carlos, Brazil

    Renato Bortoloti & Julio Cesar de Rose

  3. Universidade Estadual de Londrina, Londrina, Brazil

    João Henrique de Almeida

  4. Universidade Federal de São Carlos, São Carlos, Brazil

    Julio Cesar de Rose

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  1. Renato Bortoloti
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  2. Rodrigo Vianna de Almeida
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  3. João Henrique de Almeida
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  4. Julio Cesar de Rose
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Correspondence to Renato Bortoloti.

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Bortoloti, R., de Almeida, R.V., de Almeida, J.H. et al. A Commentary on the Dynamics of Arbitrarily Applicable Relational Responding Involving Positive Valenced Stimuli and its Implications for the IRAP Research. Psychol Rec 71, 481–486 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40732-020-00413-2

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