Narrative: Why It's Important, and How It Works

A Two-Phase Qualitative Enquiry Into Storytelling's Potential to Support Palliative Care Patient-Led Change, Using a Systematic Review Approach

A terminal diagnosis can diminish an individual's sense of agency and identity. Leading change appears to restore a sense of agential self. The first phase of this literature review explores factors influencing patient-led change across the palliative care ecosystem. The second phase illuminates how storytelling can support palliative care patients in leading ecosystem-wide change. 35 studies were identified in Phase 1 and 36 in Phase 2. This research highlights the need to situate patient leadership activity within a palliative care ecosystem to understand factors likely to support or hinder patient leadership activity within it. The evidence indicates the potential use of storytelling to support patients with a life-limiting illness to lead change across the palliative care ecosystem. This challenges current conceptualisations of such patients and offers them instead as an additional source of palliative care support.

Promoting Reciprocal Relations across Subfields of Behavior Analysis via Collaborations

Several barriers may inhibit the growth of behavior analysis as a more integrated and collaborative field. Two such barriers are siloed environments that reinforce a basic-applied distinction, and a lack of translational research pathways. We describe the perils of silos, and elaborate on potential solutions to increase reciprocal relations among subfields in behavior analysis. We promote a five-tiered system to classify research in behavior analysis, and discuss literature on cultivating effective intra and cross-disciplinary collaborations, including using the framework of metacontingencies to understand collaborations. We also propose quantitative and qualitative measures to examine whether the potential solutions increase intra and interdisciplinary interactions. These measures include bibliometric (e.g., citations across fields), sociometric (e.g., social network analysis), and narrative analysis. We apply some of these measures to publications from 2011-2022 from the Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior and Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis, and argue that behavior analysis overall may benefit from a more collaborative approach.

Supplementary Information

The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s40614-023-00386-x.

Crafting Sequences of Sight and Sound: A Behavior Analysis of Filmmaking

The discipline of film studies often engages in analyses of the functions of filmmakers' decisions in terms of their effects on viewers. Behavior analysis uses a similar, functional-analytic approach toward understanding the relationship between individuals' behavior and the environmental effects that maintain their behavior. Given converging similarities between the two disciplines, a functional analysis of filmmaking is provided, using Skinner (1957)'s Verbal Behavior as a guiding framework. Similar to behavioral conceptualizations of language and speaker-listener verbal episodes, the analysis prioritizes functional explanation of the controlling variables and conditions that underlie the meaning of filmmakers' behavior and behavioral products, rather than solely focusing on their topographical description. Viewers' responses to the audiovisual stimuli of the film are emphasized as key controlling variables, through rules specifying contingency relations as well as through contingency shaping, including when the filmmaker acts as a self-viewer who directly shapes their own behavior. Their responding as a self-viewer during the production and editing of a film is explored as a problem-solving process, similar to other artists who serve as their own audience when creating and editing their behavioral products.

Measuring the Dissemination Impact of Culturo-Behavioral Science

Culturo-behavior science addresses many of the world's most significant problems and therefore has potential to create world-changing outcomes. Before systems level changes that improve the world can be implemented, however, it is first necessary for the public to know about and take interest in the accomplishments of culturo-behavior science. Measurable evidence that this kind of influence is being achieved is a component of "dissemination impact," an important but often overlooked form of accountability on sciences that target real-world problems. We describe a method for quantifying some aspects of dissemination impact and present data on how much of this impact has been earned by articles published in Behavior and Social Issues. The results provide considerable food for thought about how culturo-behavior science can proceed toward making the strategic pursuit of dissemination impact a component of its evidence-based practices.

Supplementary Information

The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s42822-022-00120-3.

Prolegomena to any future philosophy of behavior analysis as a science

This tribute to Howard Rachlin speculates about scholarly work that might have been. It explores how behavioral data might bear on philosophical issues, with examples that might be called case studies in experimental philosophy. In 1964, an issue of the Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society served a similar function. It was entitled "Psychology: A Behavioral Interpretation"; the papers included "Will," "Experience," "Appetite," "Humors," "Anxiety," and "Man." This presentation imagines what a contemporary project devoted to philosophical and behavior analytic perspectives on the topics of causation, freedom and volition, good and evil, time, words, and mind might have looked like. Along the way it notes how the project would have benefitted from Howard Rachlin's seminal contributions to both behavior analysis and philosophy. If ever such a project comes to pass, it will inevitably bear the stamp of his contributions.

Teaching Behavior Analysis through Its History: Narrative and Stories

Four articles appear in a special section of the current issue of this journal. Each offers methods for introducing students to the history of behavior analysis. Their distinctive approaches vary from delineating a course addressed specifically to history, to combining issues in behavior analysis with those within related fields, or to splicing historical events or methods into various courses within behavior analysis. I sketch these briefly to encourage readers to read them directly before proposing that the history of our field can also be understood both as an overarching narrative and as a collection of stories. Boje (2008) distinguishes between the two by characterizing narrative as a rather formal, organized account, on the one hand, with stories, on the other hand, being more disorderly episodes of behavior-in-process. Each has its roles for introducing behavior analysis-and even for effectively understanding it ourselves-and thus, the best place of each within strategies of teaching, bears systematic examination. Although narrative supplies an organized account, stories more strongly engage the reader. Stories are especially effective at keeping the reader or listener engaged when they entail nested relations delineated by establishing stimuli. Besides offering a principle of organization, this formulation yields a strategy for using stories to enable the overarching narrative to sustain the reader's or listener's behavior.

How to Do Things With Texts: A Functional Account of Reading Comprehension

We offer an account of reading comprehension that we believe will help clarify some common conceptual confusions in the relevant literature, as well as contribute to existing functional accounts. We argue that defining texts qua texts as stimulus classes, on the one hand, and equating "comprehension" with behavior (covert or otherwise), on the other, are not useful conceptual moves, especially when behavioral settings go beyond basic literacy skills acquisition. We then analyze the structure of the contingencies that usually evoke talk of "comprehension" using techniques from analytic philosophy. We show how keeping the results of this analysis in mind can help avoid the conceptual bafflement that often arises, even among behavior analysts, when defining or assessing behavioral phenomena related to reading comprehension. Using two contrasting cases (legal texts and stories), we argue that what counts as comprehension depends, not peripherally but crucially, on the shared social practices of which texts are a part. Finally, we propose a new framework for classifying reader-text contingencies by combining two dimensions: openness of setting and embeddedness of reinforcement.

On the behavioral economics of medication choice: A research story

Behavioral economics has been consistently useful in describing a wide range of clinical phenomena, particularly in reference to behavioral excesses such as substance abuse, problematic gambling and obesity/overeating. Given an opportunity to explore these processes as they relate to treatment adherence in patients with multiple sclerosis (MS), our central thesis was that behavioral economic tools/processes that have been helpful in other areas of application (e.g., substance abuse, obesity) could be leveraged to help understand treatment non-adherence and hopefully lead to efforts to combat it. The current paper tells a story of how an interdisciplinary set of researchers came to combine their separate expertise in MS and behavioral economics to yield novel insights into the failures of treatment adherence often experienced in this clinical population.

The Future of Verbal Behavior: Together Is Better

Prior editorials have addressed the question "Where do we go from here?" This is a reasonable query as an incoming editorial team considers new perspectives and initiatives that may further benefit the journal. I will address two important highlights of the revised mission statement of The Analysis of Verbal Behavior aimed at actively encouraging diversity of thought in publications and focusing on narrowing the gap between applied research and practice.

The Power of Narratives Derives from Evoked Behavior

The power of stories derives, not from the verbal stimuli themselves, but from the interaction of such stimuli with the on-going idiosyncratic behavior of the listener. This interaction produces behavioral effects that go far beyond what might be expected from a consideration of the narrative as an arrangement of verbal stimuli.

Narrative: Its Importance in Modern Behavior Analysis and Therapy

The current article considers how the analysis of language and cognition in RFT may be conceptualized as a multi-dimensional multi-level framework (MDML) for understanding how simple units of analysis specified in RFT connect to more complex units, such as the relating of relational networks, which is seen as critical to narrative and story-telling. A brief outline of the framework is used to illustrate the importance of narrative in the treatment of human psychological suffering. In addition, the development of the concepts of verbal functional analysis and the drill-down are presented as examples of how the therapeutic relationship itself can be understood through the lens of the MDML and RFT more generally.