Abstract
It has been suggested that the language of behavior analysis is not always consumer-friendly, but the very limited empirical support for this claim comes from examining jargon in English. We consulted publicly available data sets to shed light on one specific aspect of the jargon problem: how non-English speakers may react emotionally to the technical vocabulary of behavior analysis. Previous research has suggested that English speakers may experience English technical terms as unpleasant. Here, we show that the same may apply when speakers of other languages (Egyptian Arabic, French, German, Brazilian Portuguese, and Spanish) encounter translated technical terms. Our results, although constrained by the availability of data for only a small sample of relevant terms, suggest that responses of English speakers to English terms may be a good predictor of emotional responding to translated terms. To our knowledge, this is the first empirical study to address international ramifications of a so-called marketing problem in behavior analysis. Our main purpose is to call attention to the need for cross-language and cross-cultural studies on factors that affect public perceptions and acceptance of behavior analysis.
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Notes
Many of the studies have been conducted using electronic “crowdsourcing” tools for data collection such as Amazon mTurk, and some evidence suggests that samples obtained in this way better approximate the general population than do traditional, university-based participant pools (Paolacci & Chandler 2014).
Actually, the scale presented to raters ran from 1 = Happy to 9 = Unhappy, and ratings were then inverted (1 = Unhappy to 9 = Happy) for purposes of data presentation, presumably because of the intuitive sense that higher numbers should reflect better outcomes. Both types of scales have been used in previous word-emotion studies. In the present report, we discuss the Warriner and SG corpora in terms of inverted ratings.
Other team members were Tomás Jesús Carrasco Giménez, Maricel Cigales, Carrie Dempsey, Maria Xesús Froján Parga, Oscar García Leal, Esteve Frexa i Baque, Aníbal Gutiérrez, Rocío Hernández Pozo, Camilo Hurtado-Parrado, Sarah Lechago, Wilson López, Neil Martin, Fae Mellichamp, Jesús Ángel Miguel García, Rafael Moreno Rodríguez, Jose Navarro Guzmán, Celia Nogales González, Gabriel Schnerch, Luis Valero Aguayo, and Alejandra Zaragoza Scherman.
To identify behavior analysis terms, we used the BACB® Brazilian Portuguese glossary. A glossary created in Portugal also is available.
The Egyptian dialect is the most-spoken variety of Arabic.
A few studies, conducted in analog rather than treatment settings, show that when treatments are described in behavior analysis jargon nonexperts tend to view then as unacceptable (Becirevic et al., 2016; Witt et al., 1984) and implement them poorly (Rolider et al., 1998). To our knowledge, only one study (Jarmolowicz et al., 2008) has reported similar effects in a treatment milieu.
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Critchfield, T.S., Doepke, K.J. Emotional Overtones of Behavior Analysis Terms in English and Five Other Languages. Behav Analysis Practice 11, 97–105 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40617-018-0222-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s40617-018-0222-3