Friman, P. C., Hayes, S. C., & Wilson, K. G. (1998).
Why behavior analysts should study emotion: The example of anxiety.
Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis,
31, 137-156.
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 language-able 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.
DESCRIPTORS: anxiety, emotion, avoidance, stimulus equivalence,
relational frame theory