Date of Graduation

Summer 2024

Degree

Master of Science in Behavior Analysis & Therapy

Department

Mental Health & Behavioral Science

Committee Chair

Jordan Belisle

Abstract

Emotions are a naturally occurring and unavoidable part of life. To investigate the role that negative emotional experiencing plays in transfer of stimulus function, relational behavior, and intervention effectiveness, this thesis combines and explores the implications of two manuscripts that examine the effects of negative emotional contexts. Specifically, the first chapter presents research demonstrating the ability of operant schedules of reinforcement and respondent relational training to result in acquired affective and willingness stimulus functions. A between groups design demonstrated that when paired with a frustration-inducing task, negatively valenced functions can be established for arbitrary stimuli, and when observational pairing was used to relate those stimuli with other stimuli, the stimulus functions not only transferred to those stimuli but the function appeared to diffuse across the stimuli, lessening the stimulus functions for the originally trained stimuli. Taking into consideration how behavior changes while experiencing a negative emotional context, the second chapter presents an experiment assessing the effects of brief mindful practice on impulsive responding while experiencing a stressful noise context. In this study, a Go/No-Go task is utilized as a measure of impulsivity to explore the generality of existing findings from research conducted through a delay discounting account of impulsivity (Dixon et al., 2019). Participants were assigned to either a mindfulness+ or mindfulness- intervention group, and participants from both groups completed a Go/No-Go task before and after their respective intervention. During one of the Go/No-Go task completions, a stressful noise context was introduced for the duration of the task. Findings suggest that impulsive responding did not change dependent upon intervention group or stress condition. Taken together, these results suggest a need for emphasis on understanding an individual’s emotional context and the extent to which it affects their behavior in order to better determine whether intervention is necessary and what type of intervention may be most meaningful for improving their context.

Keywords

affect, willingness, impulsivity, stress, mindfulness, AWS, Go/No-Go, emotional experiencing, SPOP, valence

Subject Categories

Applied Behavior Analysis | Experimental Analysis of Behavior

Copyright

© Amanda Nicole Middleton

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Open Access

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