Dialectical behavior therapy (DBT) can be considered the most effective treatment when attending to problem behaviors that define borderline personality disorder (BPD). This therapy employs chain analysis as the tool for accounting of contextual variables that maintain these behaviors. However, these detected variables are descriptive and temporal rather than strictly functional. That is, the role of contextual variables is analyzed regarding temporal relations with problem behavior but not in terms of contingency relations that allow showing their function. Thus, a functional approach to hypothesize these contingency relations between responses and the variables that control them was carried out. Behavior functional analysis was employed as a tool and functional hypotheses of the DSM‐5‐TR criteria for BPD were conducted. The conclusion is that the proposed approach can be combined with DBT chain analysis to elaborate more accurate functional hypotheses about cases displaying the behaviors defined in the diagnosis.

For decades, behavioural psychology has tried to define and explain the acquisition and maintenance of symbolic behaviour through learning processes. In this sense, many classic studies have discovered how one stimulus can acquire the function of other, even without specific training, what has been called 'equivalence classes'. This phenomenon, called emergency and transfer of functions, has been considered important to understand the symbolic behaviour since signs acquire part of their meaning and function to their reference.Studies that have received more interested to date explain this phenomenon through operant conditioning processes, ignoring the explanatory importance of classical conditioning processes. For instance, the Relational Frame Theory.