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I talk about relational Frames a lot here, so figured I should review again. It's based on the concept of a verbal operant, and rooted in the 4 term contingency: Something in the environment triggers your response (accounting for your motivation, importantly) which then alters the environment,

changing how you feel, which either reinforces or punishes you - decreasing or increasing future behavior. You're hungry, see food in the fridge, make a sandwich, eat it, feel good, likely will make another next time you're hungry.

The verbal operant describes how verbal communities (e.g. a language or culture) reinforce communication for wants, for labeling things, for listening behavior, etc. After the response to the environment, the individual receives reinforcement (social, artificial, etc.).

What an individual is building up is a repertoire of responding to stimuli. A bird is a "bird". "Fish" is a fish. 2 + 2 is "four". That feeling in my chest is "sadness". e.g. the word cookie has levels of use across operants: I want a cookie, it is a cookie, the cookie is here. You bake a cookie.

But behaviorists noticed something funny happens - generalization. Not only will their repertoire grow, but their ability to independently learn and generalize grows. This is partially accounted for by increased access to reinforcement by an expanded repertoire of verbal behavior,

but only because the learner has developed a repertoire of relational responding. In each operant, a stimulus relation is formed between the verbal behavior and the stimulus. We call this stimulus equivalence, having to do of course with the relations between stimuli.

Usually, it's reflexive or symmetrical. But sometimes transitive, where an untrained relation occurs.

For instance, if initially "ball" is trained for ball, it may be only an exact replica that evokes responding (A=A). But the learner begins to 'loosen' to other types of balls (A=B). Then, if we play with ball outside sometimes (C), the presence of being outside might evoke the word "ball" (A=C)

Which brings us to Relational Frame Theory. When researchers looked more closely at stimulus equivalence, and specifically generalization, they found subtle variables at work. The generalizations seemed to be arbitrarily applicable.

The relations (derived applicable relational responding!), could be reflexive, symmetric or transitive, and altered the relations of the other stimuli. For instance, there have been many frames studied: frames of function (what a stimulus does), its sameness, opposition, distinction, comparison,

hierarchical placement, spatial orientation, temporality, causality, deictic (perspective taking). Each of these is an operant that describes the contingencies involved in the stimulus relations, including the arbitrarily applicable derived responding to relational frames.

What this looks like, for actual people in society, is obviously complex. You can't possibly isolate all of the variables in an individual's daily life. But behaviorists have a pretty good track record of finding important observable measurable behaviors and then building our science on that.