Moving forward during major goal blockage: situational goal adjustment in women facing infertility

Individuals confronting chronic medical conditions often face profound challenges to cherished life goals. The primary aim of this study was to examine the associations of goal adjustment with psychological adjustment in the context of infertility. At study entry (T1; n = 97) and 6 months later (T2; n = 47), women in fertility treatment completed measures of goal blockage, goal adjustment ability, and psychological adjustment. At T1, greater perceived and actual goal blockage were related to negative psychological adjustment. Ability to disengage from the goal of biological parenthood was associated with less infertility-specific thought intrusion, whereas engagement with other goals was related to fewer depressive symptoms and greater positive states of mind. Greater general goal engagement was protective against the negative relationships between low goal disengagement and the dependent variables. Promoting letting go of the unattainable and investing in the possible may be a useful intervention to foster well-being among individuals experiencing profound goal blockage

Related to Anxiety: Arbitrarily Applicable Relational Responding and Experimental Psychopathology Research on Fear and Avoidance

Humans have an unparalleled ability to engage in arbitrarily applicable relational responding (AARR). One of the consequences of this ability to spontaneously combine and relate events from the past, present, and future may, in fact, be a propensity to suffer. For instance, maladaptive fear and avoidance of remote or derived threats may actually perpetuate anxiety. In this narrative review, we consider contemporary AARR research on fear and avoidance as it relates to anxiety. We first describe laboratory-based research on the emergent spread of fear- and avoidance-eliciting functions in humans. Next, we consider the validity of AARR research on fear and avoidance and address the therapeutic implications of the work. Finally, we outline challenges and opportunities for a greater synthesis between behavior analysis research on AARR and experimental psychopathology

Using action dynamics to assess competing stimulus control during stimulus equivalence testing

Previous studies have identified potential sources of competing stimulus control in tests for stimulus equivalence. The present experiment employed the Nintendo Wii remote (WiimoteA (R)) to investigate whether such competition would affect suboperant action dynamics (e.g., topographies of equivalence responses). Following one-to-many training on conditional discriminations sufficient to establish three 3-member equivalence classes, participants were presented with a test for equivalence responding that included five different trial types. These included "traditional" equivalence trials, on which the incorrect stimulus had previously been presented as a correct comparison stimulus during training, trials on which a novel unrelated word was provided as the incorrect comparison, and trials on which the incorrect stimulus varied in orthographical and phonological similarity to the sample stimulus. The presence of phonological and orthographic distractor stimuli significantly reduced the probability of equivalence-consistent responding, relative to neutral distractors, but this effect was almost exclusively seen in participants who failed to demonstrate equivalence on traditional equivalence trials. Analyses of correct response trajectories suggested that the prior history of reinforcement for choosing the incorrect stimulus on the traditional equivalence trial gave rise to greater competition than did phonological or orthographic similarity between the sample and incorrect comparisons