Friman P C, Hayes S C, Wilson K G
Creighton University School of Medicine.
J Appl Behav Anal. 1998 Spring;31(1):137-56. doi: 10.1901/jaba.1998.31-137.
Historically, anxiety has been a dominant subject in mainstream psychology but an incidental or even insignificant one in behavior analysis. We discuss several reasons for this discrepancy. We follow with a behavior-analytic conceptualization of anxiety that could just as easily be applied to emotion in general. Its primary points are (a) that languageable humans have an extraordinary capacity to derive relations between events and that it is a simple matter to show that neutral stimuli can acquire discriminative functions indirectly with no direct training; (b) that private events can readily acquire discriminative functions; (c) that anxiety disorders seem to occur with little apparent direct learning or that the amount of direct learning is extraordinarily out of proportion with the amount of responding; and (d) that the primary function of anxious behavior is experiential avoidance. We conclude that the most interesting aspects of anxiety disorders may occur as a function of derived rather than direct relations between public events and overt and private responses with avoidance functions. Implicit in this conclusion and explicit in the paper is the assertion that anxiety is a suitable subject for behavior-analytic study.
从历史上看，焦虑在主流心理学中一直是一个主要研究对象，但在行为分析中却是一个附带的甚至微不足道的研究对象。我们讨论了造成这种差异的几个原因。接下来，我们将给出一个焦虑的行为分析概念化解释，它同样可以轻松地应用于一般情绪。其主要观点包括：（a）能够使用语言的人类具有非凡的能力来推导事件之间的关系，而且很容易证明中性刺激无需直接训练就能间接获得辨别功能；（b）私密事件能够轻易获得辨别功能；（c）焦虑症似乎在几乎没有明显直接学习的情况下发生，或者直接学习的量与反应的量极不相称；（d）焦虑行为的主要功能是经验回避。我们得出结论，焦虑症最有趣的方面可能是作为公共事件与具有回避功能的公开和私密反应之间派生而非直接关系的一种函数而出现的。这个结论中隐含的以及本文明确提出的观点是，焦虑是行为分析研究的一个合适主题。
