Decision Making in Social Context in Patients with Suicide Attempt History

Decision making has been found to be altered in suicide attempters, but little is known of their performance in social contexts. Twenty‐seven depressed suicide attempters (DSA), 25 nonsuicidal depressed patients (DP), and 60 healthy participants (HC) were evaluated by a decision‐making task in social context . Results indicated DSA and DP obtained lower gains and invested more money with angry partners. DSA were found to invest less money than DP and HC with happy partners. DSA showed insensitivity toward rewards/punishment contingency, and they did not use the socioemotional stimuli to guide their decisions.     

Equivalent Stimuli are more Strongly Related after Training With Delayed Matching Than after Simultaneous Matching: A Study Using the Implicit Relational Assessment Procedure (IRAP)

The Psychological Record - Bortoloti and de Rose (2009) found evidence that the level of functional transfer is higher in equivalence classes generated by delayed matching to sample (DMTS) than in...     

With Fellow Travelers to Nodal Places: Reply to Dajani,Doñas,and Peltz

In this response to the useful discussions of my paper by Peltz, Dajani, and Doñas (this issue), I emphasize the complexity of the intersections that lie at juncture of the personal and the social registers of the unconscious, problematizing conventional notions of “internal” and “external.” Additionally, I draw out a distinction between the political and politics as regards psychoanalytic practice, and suggest that this practice can fruitfully occur in places beyond the consulting room.     

Exploring a Training IRAP as a single participant context for analyzing reversed derived relations and persistent rule-following

Rule-governed behavior and derived stimulus relations have always shared strong conceptual links within behavior analysis. However, experimental analysis linking the two domains remains limited. The current study consisted of three experiments that aimed to continue to bridge this experimental gap. The first experiment sought to establish the extent to which a training version of the implicit relational assessment procedure (IRAP) could be used to establish and successfully reverse experimentally established derived relations. The results suggested that the Training IRAP could successfully produce derived reversals. Experiments 2 and 3 explored the extent to which reversed derived relations would control rule-governed behavior when the contingencies for rule-following competed with the rule. In Experiment 2, the task contingencies were immediately in opposition to the (reversed) derived rule, and participants generally responded in accordance with the task contingencies, rather than the rule. In Experiment 3, the task contingencies were initially rule-consistent before a contingency reversal that later made them rule-inconsistent. Here evidence of rule-persistence emerged. The results of the research are considered within the context of a recent framework that has emerged out of RFT for analyzing the dynamics involved in derived relational responding.