Exploring Differential Trial-Type Effects and the Impact of a Read-Aloud Procedure on Deictic Relational Responding on the IRAP

Under the rubric of Relational Frame Theory (RFT), researchers have investigated the role of deictic relational responding in the analysis of self in relation to others, place, and time, primarily through the use of an extended developmental protocol (Barnes-Holmes, 2001). In a move toward extending methodologies for studying deictic relational responding, more recent research has employed the Implicit Relational Assessment Procedure (IRAP) to measure deictic relational responding regarding I versus OTHER (Barbero-Rubio et al. in The Psychological Record, 66, 243–252, 2016). The initial purpose of the current study was to systematically replicate and extend this research. This extension involved the inclusion of a control condition in which no responding to self was involved, only responding to others. The results from Experiment 1 yielded significant IRAP effects for two of the four trial-types in both the deictic and control IRAPs. A second experiment involved a novel method for collecting IRAP data (a read-aloud procedure), which had been shown to yield significant effects for all four trial-types, and four significant effects were indeed recorded for both deictic and control IRAPs. Based on the current findings, a model is presented that seeks to explain the differential trial-type effects that are observed across the different IRAPs and the impact of the read-aloud procedure.