Asked to respond to this definition of mindfulness: a type of self-awareness that helps the client to remain in the presence of aversive Sds (such as negative thoughts, feelings and events) that typically evoke avoidance repertoires. In turn, this provides an opportunity for new, more adaptive behavior to emerge and be reinforced. (R.J. Kohlenberg)
Reply: There are many problems with Kohlenberg’s definition. And, I would argue a less than optimal therapeutic approach. I doubt many of the Buddhist monks practicing mindfulness have a history of trying to avoid aversive stimuli. It may be useful when confronting pain and other aversive events, but I doubt that is the reason they would give you for its practice. Those activities that constitute “mindfulness” likely each have their own establishment history and consequences that maintain them, none of which are private. A key question is what are the observable independent variables, and what are the observable dependent variables? The instructions, the breathing exercises, and the trained diaphragmatic control are all observable.
Clinically, once established, in the face of coalescing contingencies reflecting a behavioral requirement that are difficult to meet that gets described as particular recurring thoughts in order to bring others into contact with the contingency requirements; it matters little what they are for, how anyone can know that the thoughts they they think they are thinking are the thoughts they are actually thinking, since discrimination training for thoughts is impossible. Actually, Verplanck demonstrated that the self-generated rules people claimed they were following were not in fact followed), one can follow instructions to engage in the learned diaphragmatic control, which has two effects. One is that by so doing, control by those other contingencies is momentarily lessened, and there is accomplishment of meeting the requirements of the diaphragmatic control. The problem of course is that the contingencies that gave rise to the issue in the first place are unchanged. One is simply superimposing one contingency on another and hoping the resulting behavioral variation has positive outcome.
But is that really mindfulness? What are the social contingencies that help maintain the practices? More on that on Friday. Hope this helps a bit.
More from the dialog:
Reply: Early in the discussion you make the point that a variety of different procedures occasion the use of the term mindfulness. You clearly point out that one use of the term may not reflect the use of the term by others. Accordingly, there is no application of any one set of procedures one can confidently assert represents mindfulness training.
Accordingly, mindfulness is a match to an experimenter’s scoresheet by certain prescribed indicator responses. These are all observable and include, posture, breathing rate, perhaps specified changes of behavior in described contexts, and verbal reports. When participant behavior results in meeting criteria defined by a certain number of scoresheet matches, that particular use of mindfulness is defined. Thus, the differences in the usage of mindfulness is a function of the difference in scoresheets. These constitute the dependent variable in mindfulness studies.
The independent variables are the potentiating variables, instructions, and consequences arranged that result in the scoresheet matches.
This may be made more clear by making some changes in your descriptions, for example:
Quote: “Though few studies rigorously demonstrated experimental control, the single subject design was a useful design. It permitted authors to document training outcomes. They evaluated if mindfulness practices as described and used in the experiment, performed under specific condition, impacted other behaviors of interest. And participants benefitted, finding the experience useful and helpful as indicated by… For example, a breathing activity impacted academic engagement. Mindfulness-informed activities Activities such as… improved on-task behavior and performance. These activities characterized by the authors as MBPs resulted in decreased aggression, noncompliance, off-task behavior, and smoking.”
Mindfulness discussions often veer away from the observed world into what is referred to as private events or experiences. Observed instructions are hypothesized to alter one’s private responses to this experiences. To the extent one assumes that the indicator responses recorded reflect private responses of some sort, one is engaged in the operationism of methodological behaviorism criticized by Skinner (1945). Further, no matter what the instruction, or the participant verbal reports, one cannot assume that reported private experience of the participant is actually occurring, or matches what another participant is experiencing who reports the same exact thing. Arguing over what private experience is or is not occurring is likely fruitless.
There are countless studies that demonstrate that what participants report as being subjectively experienced could not, in fact, be the case (Azrin Flanagan and Goldiamond 1958; Goldiamond, 1958a, 1958b, 1964; Goldiamond and Thompson, 1968; Layng, 1995; Layng, R. 2015). In all such instance the locus of control was determined to be in the instructions provided, not in the subjective event reported (see Layng, 1995). Reports of subjective events have also been shown to change in order to attain agreement with the therapist or experimenter (see Layng, et al 2022). For example, indices of (reported) experiential avoidance change simply by asking a participant to “respond to the AAQ-II survey as you think your therapist would want you to” (Layng, R. 2015; also see Layng et al 2022, chapter 9). This has been demonstrated for ambiguous public events as well (Robbins, Layng, and Karp, 1995). Where participants are unaware of the experimenter arranged contingencies responsible for their behavior they may resort to reporting private events, such as anxiety, as the basis for, or cause of their responding (Flanagan, Goldiamond, and Azrin, 1959). So doe that mean one should give up helping people achieve some of the benefits mindfulness practices are trying to achieve, or to understand intent, or curiosity, or compassion?
To the extent such qualities as intent, curiosity, compassion, etc. are to be encouraged or studied one can readily do so not by treating them as private things or events, certain behavioral qualia, or as specified sets of behavior, but instead as language games that reflect certain consequential contingencies (see Sumner, 2021 for a similar approach to “creativity”). That is, the words are used to bring others into contact with the contingencies (often undescribed) they are experiencing. For example, intent often describes the effect potentiating variables, and the occasions on which certain actions are likely to be reinforced. One can analyze intent much the same way as it is done in a court of law by assessing opportunity, means, and motive (payoff). If I say I did not intend to do X I describe the absence of one or more of these elements. If I intended to do it I describe the presence of these elements, and if intended to do it, but did not, I can be describing the effects other contingencies even though the behavior referenced (intended) did not occur. Goldiamond (1976) provides a much more detailed contingency analysis of intent that incorporates certain nonlinear (decision theory) relations as well.
Feelings of conflict between what is intended and what actually occurs may describe the action of conflicting contingencies. The daily event logs used in the Constructional Approach makes these relations explicit moment-to-moment when clients are asked to describe hourly circumstances, activity intended or what you wanted, actual activity or what you got, comments and feelings. Intent is used as contingency indicators and bring the person into contact with them and teaches them that their private experience reflects contingencies and how to intervene to change them, and as a result the private experience itself. It does so without trying to superimpose one contingency on another as when is instructed to engage in certain breathing or other exercises when faced with a challenging circumstance (though this may occasionally be temporarily helpful), but by understanding and changing contingency requirements. One could argue, this is a form of mindfulness that brings one into the closest contact possible with the now all without putting the locus inside the individual, all without ignoring private experience. It may be worth considering how a consequential contingency analysis might serve to inform the practices and provide the benefits which are the goals of the various forms of mindfulness training.
And later… A different approach to private experience may be more productive which (according to my philosophy major son) is more closely aligned with the Buddhist tradition. That is, there are no covert responses or stimuli, no words privately spoken, or images to see. What is experienced, during meditation, for example, is a change in a relation to the environment and the effects of changes in the variables that affect that relation. Since the verbal community has no access to that experience, we have no words for it. The words we use are those accepted by the verbal community when referring to that experience, a particular language game. They are not descriptions of that private experience. The Buddhist tradition is try to understand this and breakaway from description itself, of any kind. In essence, it is to be one with the moment-to-moment flow of contingencies and not put words to it. What we can observe are the contingencies responsible for the experience. So, instead of observing my experience of anxiety, what I am really observing is my experience of trying to meet a behavioral requirement for which I may not be prepared to meet. Saying, “I feel anxious,” is my attempt to bring others into contact with the contingency requirement I am facing. There is no private “something” called anxiety. The is how radical behaviorism can help us directly investigate private experience without resorting to methodological behaviorism’s operationism, or by trying to move stimuli or responses into the head.
Answer to precedential contingency (classical conditioning) question. The ordering of the sets X Y Z is not relevant to the definition of contingency (see chapter 3 in NCA book). Consequential: (x1 and y1) z1 or z0, Precedential: x1 (z1 and y1). In the precedential contingency z1 and the y1 that accompanies it (meat powder, z1, which elicits salivation y1) is made contingent on x1 (the sound of a bell, x1). Notice in both that x1 and y1 must occur. What one also notices is that precedential relations always begin as dependencies, it is only after exposure that the relation shifts to x1 and (z1 or z0 ) y1. When we test we omit z1, leaving z0, we observe x1 y1, just as we do in consequential relations when we have z0. Cool right?
Clinical Question Here’s what is typically done:
Progressive Muscle Relaxation – this certainly helps with the physiological arousal that often accompanies chronic worry, but it doesn’t really impact the worry
Very cognitive approaches like: 1) attention control training (the theory here is that repetitive negative thinking occurs because they can’t control their attention sufficiently), 2) teaching clients to evalute the risk of the feared outcome and to focus more on all the ways they could cope if the undesriable event happened rather than focusing on how catastrophic it would be.
Exposure to the feared outcomes to either achieve habituation or an increased tolearnce of the distress brought on by the worry activive.
This is basically what’s done. All eliminative of course. The distress tolerance item is the closest intervention to being non-eliminative.
I can certainly see how to construct a repertoire for these individuals. Most tend to withdraw (e.g., sit in a chair and stare at a wall while they ruminate)…so we’d work toward active behavior in these contexts. I would imagine that doing this will compete with the worry activity much of the time (e.g., if they are engaged in something it’ll be more challenging for them to focus on their worries) and we could also say that we’ll be satisfied if they are behaving in important ways even if their worries continue. But, I think to gain acceptance we’d need to find a pattern that could be built such that the client would say their repetitive negative thinking is no longer a problem. I realize I’m straddling the eliminative fence with this because that basically says we have to get rid of these thinking patterns. I guess my questions are:
• How would you think about this worry activity in terms of eliminative and constructional goals? What would a good constructional outcome look like?
• What are your thoughts on the private events aspect of this? Forget about it and just focus on how they behave in the context of repetitive negative thinking? Or is there a means by which we might target the private worry behavior? We would anticipate that if we impacted non-linear contingencies that the worry would drop off, correct?
Answer: Our approach is as described in our book. It may include both topical and systemic interventions. First, we ascertained what it would look like if the problem were solved. In essence, the constructional interview. Next, we would have the client keep daily event logs. From that we would develop the therapeutic outcomes to be achieved. We considered GAD to be much like cigarette smoking. That is a consistent behavioral topography that occurs under a variety of situation, each of which may serve different functions.
For some functions, we used the anxiety as an opportunity to examine the behavioral requirements one faces and ascertain whether they can lower the requirement or increase their competency, for others we may find it recruits various forms of support from significant others, for yet others it may serve to allow the person a rationale for not doing things they really don’t want to do, and so on. It is often all of the above.
Under some conditions the pattern may be vestigial. That is, the consequences that established it are no longer potent (or as potent given the change in consequences for alternatives). Here Constructional Aggression Training (CAT) type (nonlinear topical) procedures might be used as described for the lizard phobia in the book. This replaces exposure procedures. What is often overlooked is what we addressed in our hallucinations paper. For generalized anxiety to be effective (consequentially) in some situations, it must occur in other situations for which there is no payoff. As we wrote, “For a behavior to be reinforced on certain occasions(SD), it must also occur under circumstances which will not lead to reinforcement (S-delta), and may even produce an aversive consequence. Its occurrence under what is traditionally termed S-delta, as well as under SD, serves as a conditional discriminative stimulus for the reinforcing verbal community.” Accordingly, once there is a solution for the SD situations, the S-delta conditions will often change without intervention or with minor topical interventions (here is where relaxation procedures might be used).
We may employ the CAT type procedure as we look at the functions and social contingencies and program for them. The Constructional Interview and weekly Logs will guide us in that respect.
The CAT procedure when done correctly, where the removal of the stimulus is under the control of the patient, not only reinforces “calmness,” but provides a sense of accomplishment and control that did not previously exist. It increases the likelihood of patient follow through and perseverance while working to establish other systemic elements typically related to component social repertoires. Some real successes are being obtained using CAT to deal with highly fearful situations. What is surprising to those implanting them is how quickly it appears to work.
