Implications of Behavioral Narratology for Psychotherapy, Help-Seeking Behavior, and Substance Use

According to RFT, in the development of language, initial verbal responses are generated through direct contingencies, but typically developing children quickly learn the ability to derive relations between objects and their words as a result of a history of training with multiple exemplars across many situations (Barnes-Holmes & Barnes-Holmes, 2000; Greer & Speckman, 2009; Hayes et al., 2001b; Hayes & Wilson, 1993; Roche et al., 2002). [...]relating becomes a generalized operant response class through which humans come to associate words with one another (and with physical objects and their properties) along nonformal dimensions and through different types of relationships such as same as, different than, more than, opposite of, better than, worse than, before–after, and so on (Dymond & Roche, 2013; Hayes et al., 2001a; Roche et al., 2002). An important aspect of RFT is the transformation of function, in which the behavioral functions of one stimulus change based on its participation in a relational frame (verbal relation) with another stimulus. [...]the stimulus functions (e.g., reinforcing, discriminative, motivational, emotion-eliciting) of objects, concepts, and events are transferred and transformed through our relational ability and contextual cues (Hayes et al., 2001a). In order to illustrate the value of Hineline’s focus on this type of verbal behavior, we briefly address how an understanding of language and narrative may apply to CT and ACT in the context of treating human