A Pilot Study: Evaluating the Effects of Defusion on Choice Making Under Negative and Positive Reinforcement Contingencies

An apparatus and procedure for studying discounting of real outcomes of money and aversive sound

“…The procedure studied here has potential benefits for measuring behavior change that is representative of human behavior in everyday behavior problems and providing a baseline for further evaluating existing treatments. For example, as previously discussed in Chastain et al (2022), we used the described procedures and found reduced discounting after implementing an ACT intervention. This model could prove useful to future researchers in researching various behaviors and intervention procedures that could make a substantial difference in real-life problems.…”

“…In a prior study, to address outcomes that are real and that are aversive, in Chastain et al (2022), participants completed a discounting task with a series of choices between (1) silence and no money or (2) an aversive sound and delayed money. Specifically, we used a sound, which can be categorized as an aversive but not necessarily a painful stimulus, to mitigate ethical and practical issues with aversive stimuli (Friedel et al, 2017).…”

“…To our knowledge, this is the only discounting task that explicitly uses outcomes of real money and aversive stimuli. Chastain et al (2022) provides a potentially useful procedure involving complex contingencies in which later positive rewards are associated with smaller immediate aversive aspects, which may be relevant to many socially significant behaviors and be useful for researchers modeling applied situations. To provide an analogue that incorporates these sorts of complex contingencies, in this technical report, we provide a detailed description of the discounting task with new participants who were naïve to the procedure and with no therapeutic intervention.…”