Barnes-Holmes Dermot, Harte Colin
School of Psychology, Ulster University, Coleraine, Northern Ireland.
Departmento de Psicologia, Universidade Federal de São Carlos, São Carlos, Brazil.
Perspect Behav Sci. 2022 Jul 29;45(3):559-578. doi: 10.1007/s40614-022-00352-z. eCollection 2022 Sep.
The implicit relational assessment procedure (IRAP) was initially developed as a way to assess the strength and probability of natural verbal relations, as defined within relational frame theory (RFT), and was conceptually rooted within the behavior-analytic tradition. However, the IRAP quickly became employed primarily as a measure of implicit cognition, more in line with mainstream psychology than behavior analysis. In doing so, research using the IRAP increasingly employed ill-defined mainstream psychological terms, focused on correlational analyses with traditional psychometry, and thus emphasized prediction over the prediction-and-influence of behavior. Although perhaps beneficial to the study of implicit cognition, this approach could be argued to have limited the IRAP's utility in behavior analyses of human language and cognition. In the current article we will reflect on this suggestion, on the IRAPs place and current use in the field of behavior analysis, and on its potential future within behavioral psychology in light of recent conceptual and empirical advances in RFT. In doing so, it is hoped that the measure may be refined into a better understood, more precise, functional-analytic tool.
内隐关系评估程序（IRAP）最初是作为一种评估自然言语关系的强度和概率的方法而开发的，这种关系是在关系框架理论（RFT）中定义的，并且在概念上植根于行为分析传统。然而，IRAP很快主要被用作一种内隐认知的测量方法，这与主流心理学更为契合，而与行为分析不太一致。这样一来，使用IRAP的研究越来越多地采用定义不明确的主流心理学术语，专注于与传统心理测量学的相关分析，因此强调对行为的预测而非对行为的预测和影响。尽管这可能有利于内隐认知的研究，但可以认为这种方法限制了IRAP在人类语言和认知行为分析中的效用。在当前的文章中，我们将根据RFT最近在概念和实证方面的进展，思考这一建议，思考IRAP在行为分析领域的地位和当前用途，以及它在行为心理学中的潜在未来。这样做的目的是希望将该测量方法改进为一种更易于理解、更精确的功能分析工具。
