Abstract
Functional Analytic Psychotherapy (FAP) offers a radically behavioral and transdiagnostic conception of the formation of the “self” and the appearance of a diversity of psychological problems. This study examined the extent to which a wide variety of psychological disorders (somatization, obsessive–compulsive, interpersonal sensitivity, depression, anxiety, hostility/aggressiveness, phobic anxiety, paranoid ideation, and psychoticism) and a global index of psychopathological severity may in fact be linked to problems of the “self” according to the FAP conception. Two questionnaires, one related to self-experience according to FAP and the other to find the scores on several different psychopathology scales, were administered to 280 adult Spaniards for this purpose. The results confirmed the transdiagnostic nature of the “self”-experience. There are significant and strong correlations between all the psychopathology scales studied and self-experience. Linear regression analyses also show that, along with age and gender, in some cases, the score on self-experience predicts each and every one of the psychopathological variables studied, in addition to the Global Severity Index. These results are discussed and related to the transdiagnostic approach to psychopathology.
Highlights
Kohlenberg and Tsai [1, 2], based on various studies by Skinner [3,4,5,6], developed a radically behavioral conception of development of the “self.” According to their proposal, the verbal report “I” emerges as an independent functional unit starting from learning larger verbal expressions in which the expression “I” is used [2]
Learning the “self ”-experience as self-tact would be similar to learning tacts referring to the properties of stimuli, in which based on multiple examples with different objects where all the stimuli are different except the color, the speaker learns to develop the functional unit “red” or “blue” from wider verbal expressions learned beforehand (“red car,” “red apple,” “blue window,” “blue water,” etc.)
A correlation analysis was performed to calculate the magnitude of the relationships between self-experience and the BSI psychopathology scales
Summary
Kohlenberg and Tsai [1, 2], based on various studies by Skinner [3,4,5,6], developed a radically behavioral conception of development of the “self.” According to their proposal, the verbal report “I” emerges as an independent functional unit starting from learning larger verbal expressions in which the expression “I” is used [2]. Kohlenberg and Tsai [1] proposed that the “self ” experience emerges as a functional unit from the acquisition of larger units as a child learns to speak and showed that this process occurs in three stages. In Stage I, which usually takes place during the first 2 years of life, the child learns large functional units, such as, “I have ice cream” or “I want candy.”. These functional units are learned as a whole. The process is similar to the one in Stage II, it should be noted that the experience of “I” in Stage III should be completely under the control of private stimuli. During successive stages, one goes from public to private control of the “self ” experience, which should take its complete form in Stage III
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