TOWARD A CONSTRUCTIONAL APPROACH TO SOCIAL PROBLEMS: ETHICAL AND CONSTITUTIONAL ISSUES RAISED BY APPLIED BEHAVIOR ANALYSIS

If the program is effective, the subgoals listed for next week will appear in the records of that next week. They should be in force. What maintains recording? At least two possibilities are suggested. One is a program-progress payoff. As the entries are discussed, there may be changes in outcome, and record-keeping is reinforced. The other involves maintenance, by the client, of the programer's behavior. In different terminologies, keeping records is a demand characteristic, or part of a transference relation, or an operant which delivers therapist approval, etc. Indeed, we do have evidence bearing directly on this issue showing that the number of entries in one patient's log in each of eight weeks was a direct function of the number of supportive comments the therapist had made the preceding week.47 If the number of entries can be a function of therapist requirements, can not their contents and forms also be so governed? How does this affect the validity or independence of the data?

A simple answer is that the verbal behaviors of a patient or subject do not cease to be operants, governed by all the variables involved in operant behavior, when the person becomes a patient or an experimental subject. When the psychoanalyst says that a patient has gained insight into his own problems, what he is describing is the patient's analysis of his own behaviors and their determinants using analytic concepts (properly) in the process. Many of our patients also gain insight-into the contingencies governing their behavior. Patients under psychoanalysis can change with or without insight, and so can ours. In all cases, we tend to get out what we have put in. It is important that the influence of such variables be considered, and this has been at least one important service provided by the concept of transference. In all events, the pay-off is the cost-benefit ratio of the changes in the referent patterns in their referent ecologies. And a system which provides for continual explicit evaluation can facilitate this.

Presumably, validity of records, that is, their honesty, is also so maintained. However difficult it may be to check on the validity of certain experiences whose report the therapist reinforces, entries describing contingencies can be spot-checked-and we do.

Finally, it should not be assumed that there is no discussion of affect, or emotion. Most logs require such notation under a column headed "Comments." We consider emotions neither as caused by behavior, in the James-Lange tradition, or as causing behavior, in the more classic tradition. We consider them as contingency-related. Often they serve to indicate important contingencies which have been omitted. A record which reports a particular pattern and its immediate reinforcement along with the comment "felt miserable" obviously requires closer scrutiny.

Initially, in accord with the pathological demand characteristics of our culture, the entries under Comments are of the distressful emotions. The contingencies reported in the adjacent columns are typically in keeping. Extinction, high cost, and punishment contingencies usually accompany reports of anger and fear, in accord with the laboratory literature on the emotional effects of such contingencies. Occasionally, atypical entries appear: a homosexual masturbated and a clinically obese patient stuffed himself after the occurrence of transactions describable as extinction and high cost contingencies. In all cases, affect is related to the contingencies and is used to teach the patient to uncover such contingencies in their inception and before they become controlling. Thus, the blushing of a woman increased until her face turned purple, at which point the others noted that their conversation embarrassed her and changed the topic. She was told: Your skin is more sensitive to the embarrassing trend of a conversation than your ears are. Heed it. When you start feeling hot, stop, look, and listen, and start changing the direction of the conversation then.48 A contingency analysis of emotions does not attempt to eliminate those emotions considered undesirable, disruptive, or distressful. It attempts to sensitize people to those emotions so they can be utilized to analyze and control the contingencies relevant to them and thereby to control these emotions.