Feelings in Psychological Perspective Notes

Feelings in Psychological Perspective

Abstract

  • Based on B.F. Skinner's Radical Behaviorism, feelings are usually considered private events (biological happenings) by behavior analysts.
  • This paper addresses conceptual issues with Skinner's public-private dichotomy, considering:
    • The organismic participant.
    • The relational property of psychological events.
    • The concept of the whole organism.
    • The environmental participant.
  • Practical problems related to the public-private dichotomy are considered.
  • An interbehavioral alternative to conceptualizing feeling events is proposed, highlighting the distinguishing features of feeling events relative to other psychological events.

Introduction

  • The science of psychology is distinguished by acts of the whole organism in relation to environmental stimulation (Kantor, 1958, p. 79; Skinner, 1938, p. 6).
  • Often, this distinction is overlooked, reducing psychological phenomena to biological events (Observer, 1969).
  • This reductive interpretation neglects genuine psychological phenomena such as thinking, feeling, imagining, and remembering (Fryling & Hayes, 2010; Hayes, 1994; Hayes & Fryling, 2009a).
  • Reductive interpretation disservices the aim and progress of psychology.
  • Progress in science depends on isolating and investigating unique aspects by various disciplinary sciences.
  • Psychologists using reductive interpretations may add little to the understanding of psychological events (Hayes & Fryling, 2009a, 2009b).
  • Even in interdisciplinary work, the subject matters of participating sciences should not be blended but examined for functional relations (Hayes & Fryling, 2009b).
  • The goal is to examine the bases upon which psychological feeling events are misconstrued and offer an interpretation of feeling events from a distinctly psychological perspective.

Issue with Skinner's Conceptualization of Private Events

  • The authors disagree with B. F. Skinner’s (1953, 1957, 1969, 1974) conceptualization of private events.
  • Skinner's bifurcation of psychological events into public and private classes based on whether they occur inside or outside the responding organism's skin is considered a misstep.
  • This misstep has thwarted progress toward understanding complex psychological phenomena as natural events (Hayes, 1994; Hayes & Fryling, 2009a; Parrott, 1983b, 1986).
  • If private events are private and biological, the extent to which they can be examined in a psychological perspective is limited.
  • If much of complex behavior is private, the understanding of complex behavior in behavior analysis may be impacted, and interpretations may be incoherent.
  • The public-private distinction proposed by Skinner may impact the extent to which behavior science is both comprehensive and valid (Kantor, 1958).
  • The paper acknowledges various interpretations and debates related to Skinner’s distinction between public and private events (see Catania & Harnad, 1988).
  • The aim is to consider the public-private dichotomy itself and its implications for conceptualizing feeling events in psychological perspective rather than debating interpretations.
  • The authors' field orientation is derived from J. R. Kantor’s system of interbehaviorism (1953) and interbehavioral psychology (1958).
  • The plan is twofold:
    • Address the systemic errors giving rise to the public-private dichotomy and the practical problems engendered by it.
    • Provide an alternative interpretation of psychological feeling events derived from J. R. Kantor’s system of interbehavioral psychology.

Conceptual Problems

  • To define feelings as psychological events, it is important to discard unsatisfactory notions concerning these phenomena.
  • These notions have sources in misconstructions of the psychological datum.

The Organismic Participant

  • The view that feelings are mere visceral reactions is a disservice.
  • This formulation rests on an improper isolation of the psychological datum, especially its organismic component.
  • The organismic participant in a psychological event is the whole organism (Skinner, 1938).
  • Visceral reactions, while participating in feeling acts of the psychological type, are not themselves such acts; they are events of the biological domain.
  • Definitional constructions are derived from observations of particular types of events (Kantor, 1957).
  • Definitions abstracted from observations of biological events provide services for scientific enterprises of the biological domain exclusively.
  • A definition of feelings derived from observations of visceral reactions is not a psychological definition.
  • Psychologists who consider feelings as sheer biological activity fail to appreciate that what constitutes a feeling in a biological perspective differs from a psychological perspective.
  • This failure has forestalled the development of a coherent interpretation of feelings as psychological events, preventing feelings from being the subject of proper investigation in behavior science.

The Relational Property

  • A second disserviceable notion about feelings pertains to their classification as “private” events.
  • Skinner (1953, 1974) states that psychological events occur in different locations: inside and outside the skin of the responding organism.
  • Based on this property, Skinner divides psychological events into dichotomous classes: