In Skinner's Early Footsteps: Analyzing Verbal Behavior in Large Published Corpora

Lexicon-Based Sentiment Analysis in Behavioral Research

A complete science of human behavior requires a comprehensive account of the verbal behavior those humans exhibit. Existing behavioral theories of such verbal behavior have produced compelling insight into language's underlying function, but the expansive program of research those theories deserve has unfortunately been slow to develop. We argue that the status quo's manually implemented and study-specific coding systems are too resource intensive to be worthwhile for most behavior analysts. These high input costs in turn discourage research on verbal behavior overall. We propose lexicon-based sentiment analysis as a more modern and efficient approach to the study of human verbal products, especially naturally occurring ones (e.g., psychotherapy transcripts, social media posts). In the present discussion, we introduce the reader to principles of sentiment analysis, highlighting its usefulness as a behavior analytic tool for the study of verbal behavior. We conclude with an outline of approaches for handling some of the more complex forms of speech, like negation, sarcasm, and speculation. The appendix also provides a worked example of how sentiment analysis could be applied to existing questions in behavior analysis, complete with code that readers can incorporate into their own work.

Emotional Overtones of Behavior Analysis Terms in English and Five Other Languages

It has been suggested that the language of behavior analysis is not always consumer-friendly, but the very limited empirical support for this claim comes from examining jargon in English. We consulted publicly available data sets to shed light on one specific aspect of the jargon problem: how non-English speakers may react emotionally to the technical vocabulary of behavior analysis. Previous research has suggested that English speakers may experience English technical terms as unpleasant. Here, we show that the same may apply when speakers of other languages (Egyptian Arabic, French, German, Brazilian Portuguese, and Spanish) encounter translated technical terms. Our results, although constrained by the availability of data for only a small sample of relevant terms, suggest that responses of English speakers to English terms may be a good predictor of emotional responding to translated terms. To our knowledge, this is the first empirical study to address international ramifications of a so-called marketing problem in behavior analysis. Our main purpose is to call attention to the need for cross-language and cross-cultural studies on factors that affect public perceptions and acceptance of behavior analysis.

On the Social Validity of Behavior-Analytic Communication: a Call for Research and Description of One Method

It has often been suggested that nonexperts find the communication of behavior analysts to be viscerally off-putting. We argue that this concern should be the focus of systematic research rather than mere discussion, and describe five studies that illustrate how publicly available lists of word-emotion ratings can be used to estimate the responses of general-audience listeners. Our results provide support for the hypothesis that some of the ways in which behavior analysts tend to discuss their discipline can be unpleasant, but also illustrate inter- and intraindividual variations in pleasantness. Although our methods are atypical for behavior-analytic research, they are appropriate to the topic and sufficient to suggest many directions for additional research through which a field that considers itself sophisticated in matters of verbal behavior might shed light on its own disciplinary communication challenges.