Harte Colin, Barnes-Holmes Dermot, Barnes-Holmes Yvonne, McEnteggart Ciara
Department of Experimental, Clinical and Health Psychology, Ghent University, Belgium.
Department of Experimental, Clinical and Health Psychology, Ghent University, Belgium.
Behav Processes. 2018 Dec;157:36-46. doi: 10.1016/j.beproc.2018.08.005. Epub 2018 Aug 27.
The effects of rules on human behaviour have long been identified as important in the psychological literature. The increasing importance of the dynamics of arbitrarily applicable relational responding (AARR), with regards to rules, has come to be of particular interest within Relational Frame Theory (RFT). One feature of AARR that previous research has suggested may differentially impact persistent rule-following is level of derivation. However, no published research to date has systematically explored this suggestion. Across two experiments, the impact of levels of derivation was examined on persistent rule-following at two stages of relational development: mutual entailment (Exp. 1) and combinatorial entailment (Exp. 2). A Training IRAP was used to establish a mutually entailed relational network in Experiment 1 and a combinatorially entailed network in Experiment 2, and to train these networks to different levels of derivation. This was followed by a contingency switching Match-to-Sample (MTS) task to assess rule persistence. Results from both experiments were generally consistent with the suggestion that lower levels of derivation produce more persistent rule-following. Unexpectedly, however, the findings from Experiment 1 also indicated that persistence was moderated by the type of novel word employed. Variations in results across both experiments and their implications for future research are discussed.
规则对人类行为的影响长期以来在心理学文献中被视为重要内容。就规则而言，任意适用关系反应（AARR）动态的重要性日益增加，在关系框架理论（RFT）中已成为特别受关注的对象。先前研究表明，AARR的一个特征——推导水平，可能会对持续遵守规则产生不同影响。然而，迄今为止，尚无已发表的研究系统地探究这一观点。在两项实验中，考察了推导水平在关系发展的两个阶段——相互蕴含（实验1）和组合蕴含（实验2）——对持续遵守规则的影响。在实验1中使用训练性内隐关系评估程序（IRAP）建立一个相互蕴含的关系网络，在实验2中建立一个组合蕴含的网络，并将这些网络训练到不同的推导水平。随后进行一个应急转换的匹配样本（MTS）任务以评估规则持续性。两项实验的结果总体上与较低推导水平会产生更持续的规则遵守这一观点一致。然而，出乎意料的是，实验1的结果还表明，持续性受到所使用新单词类型的调节。讨论了两项实验结果的差异及其对未来研究的启示。
