Acceptance, the willingness to experience thoughts, feelings and physiological sensations without having to control them or let them determine one's actions, is a major individual determinant of mental health and behavioral effectiveness in a more recent theory of psychopathology. This 2-wave panel study examined the ability of acceptance also to explain mental health, job satisfaction, and performance in the work domain. The authors hypothesized that acceptance would predict these 3 outcomes 1 year later in a sample of customer service center workers in the United Kingdom (N = 412). Results indicated that acceptance predicted mental health and an objective measure of performance over and above job control, negative affectivity, and locus of control. These beneficial effects of having more job control were enhanced when people had higher levels of acceptance. The authors discuss the theoretical and practical relevance of this individual characteristic to occupational health and performance.

/pdf/the-role-of-acceptance-and-job-control-in-mental-health-job-3md9qp3eff.pdf

The role of acceptance and job control in mental health, job satisfaction, and work performance

Applied behavior analysts have developed many effective interventions for common childhood problems and have repeatedly demonstrated that childhood behavior responds to properly managed contingencies. The success of these interventions is dependent upon their basic effectiveness, as demonstrated in the literature, their precise delivery by the clinician to the parent, and adherence to or consistent implementation of the intervention. Unfortunately, arranging the consistent implementation of effective parenting strategies is a significant challenge for behavior analysts who work in homes, schools, and outpatient or primary care clinics. Much has been done to address issues of adherence or implementation in the clinic, but relatively little has been done to increase our understanding of the contingencies that affect parental adherence beyond the supervised clinic environment. An analysis of the contingencies that strengthen or weaken adherence might suggest strategies to improve implementation outside the clinic setting. What follows is an analysis of the variables associated with adherence by parents to recommendations designed to solve common childhood problems.

The problem of parental nonadherence in clinical behavior analysis: effective treatment is not enough.

The term rule-governed behavior (RGB) was first coined by Skinner (1966) to refer to behavior essential to complex human abilities. The traditional behavioral account of rulegoverned behavior presented some difficulties in describing how these abilities are formed and altered. With the advent of recent findings within the theoretical approach referred to as Relational Frame Theory (RFT), the former difficulties are at present being overcome. RFT is providing a comprehensive understanding of behavioral problems as found in diverse psychopathologies. The present paper addresses first the basic assumptions of RFT in relation to rule-following. Then, the three types of RGB, pliance, tracking and augmenting are presented. Finally, we describe the problems that can emerge from the different types of RGB, with a special emphasis on the role of ineffective augmenting as the basis of those psychological problems characterized by the occurrence of deliberate efforts to avoid certain thoughts, feelings and the like as the primary coping strategy to live which, in turn, produces paradoxical effects.

/pdf/rule-governed-behavior-and-psychological-problems-1xl3jufvjs.pdf

Rule-Governed Behavior and Psychological Problems

Observational learning is an important area in the field of psychology and behavior science more generally. Given this, it is essential that behavior analysts articulate a sound theory of how behavior change occurs through observation. This paper begins with an overview of seminal research in the area of observational learning, followed by a consideration of common behavior analytic conceptualizations of these findings. The interbehavioral perspective is then outlined, shedding light on some difficulties with the existing behavior analytic approaches. The implications of embracing the interbehavioral perspective for understanding the most complex sorts of behavior, including those involved in observational learning are considered.

Understanding observational learning: an interbehavioral approach.

Since the emergence of neoclassical economics, individual decision making has been viewed largely from an outcome-maximizing perspective. Building on previous work, the authors suggest that when people make payment decisions, they consider not only their preferences for different alternatives but also guiding principles and behavioral rules. The authors describe and test two characteristics pertaining to one specific rule that dictates consumers should not pay for delays, even if they are beneficial: rule invocation and rule override. The results show that money can function as the invoking cue for this rule, that the reliance on this rule can undermine utility maximization, and that this rule may be used as a first response to the decision problem but can be overridden. The article ends with a discussion of more general applications of such rules, which may explain some of the seemingly systematic inconsistencies in the ways consumers behave.

Decisions by Rules: The Case of Unwillingness to Pay for Beneficial Delays

A widespread view among philosophers of language is that language use is rule-governed. Such a claim need not be problematic. One can, for instance, direct it against distorted notions of language.

Juan Wilhelmi

Papers

On Rule-Following