Values as leading principles in Acceptance and Commitment Therapy.

Abstract

Abstract In this paper the definition of values as verbally constructed life consequences is examined. It agrees that values, or Leading Principles, are the products of arbitrarily applicable relational responding and holds that what is global about them is their ready availability across many circumstances. It holds that the desired are not so much as approved, and what is approved is not so much the consequences of a pursuit as the pursuit itself of which certain if they arrive, are simply a part. It suggests seeing psychological flexibility as being valuable only in so far as it is in the service of chosen values. Keywords: Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), Relational Frame Theory (RFT), motive, arbitrarily applicable relational responding (AARR). ********** I begin by noting that in Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) (Hayes, et. al., 1999) and the related theory of language, Relational Frame Theory (RFT) (Hayes, et. al., 2001), there is no limit to what can serve as relata incorporated as part of arbitrarily applicable relational responding (AARR). Thus, private events such as bodily sensations are as much potential relata as are the sounds we call words, or the objects we call trees or birds. If I ask the reader to, raise your arm mentally not physically, and if the reader does so, then my request contains both the Contexts of Function ([C.sub.func's]) and the Contexts of Relation (Crel's) that have likely led to the reader having kinesthetic and possibly visual sensations of his/her arm raising even though no publicly observable gross arm movement occurred. Thus, the point to be made at the outset is that certain response functions, in this case private bodily sensations that are part and parcel of experiences we call satisfaction or deprivation, are no less potentially available relata for incorporation into relational networks than are any other things in the world. This means that if we accept for the moment the definition of values offered by Hayes, Strosahl and Wilson in 1999 (p. 206), [v]alues are verbally constructed life consequences, then some of the functions that could be present when these kinds of verbal constructions are present are functions of experiences which we name satisfactions and deprivations. It is also worth noting that one of the basic notions of operant psychology is that organisms are already active. They do not need to be motivated to become active from what is normally a passive state. Rather, some actions become more or less probable so that what we call motivation is not what gets an organism going but what gets it going in a particular way. So called motivation changes the quality and perhaps the quantity of action. It does not create action in an otherwise inert organism. Writing in 1932, and before B. F. Skinner's Behavior of Organisms (1938), John Dewey (1960) put it this way: A motive is not then a drive to action, or something which moves to doing something. It is the movement of the self as a whole, a movement in which desire is integrated with an object so completely as to be chosen as a compelling end. The hungry person seeks food. We may say, if we please, that he is moved by hunger. But in fact hunger is only a name for the tendency to move toward the appropriation of food. To create an entity out of this active relation of the self to objects, and then to treat this abstraction as if it were the cause of seeking food is sheer confusion. The case is no different when we say that a man is moved by kindness, or mercy, or cruelty, or malice. ... Benevolence or cruelty is not something which a man has, as he may have dollars in his pocket-book; it is something which he is; and since his being is active, these qualities are modes of activity, not forces which produce action. …