A derived transfer of eliciting emotional functions using differences among electroencephalograms as a dependent measure.
Emotional brain responses can jump to new stimuli simply because they share an equivalence class.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Amd et al. (2013) taught adults to match pictures and symbols. Some pictures were paired with happy or scary sounds during training.
After the matching lessons, the team flashed the symbols alone and recorded brain waves. They asked: will the symbols that shared a class with emotional pictures also spark the same brain signature?
What they found
The EEG showed the emotion signature within 300-400 ms. Symbols that had never been paired with sounds still produced the same brain pattern as the original emotional pictures.
In plain words: feelings traveled through the equivalence class and the transfer showed up in the brain trace.
How this fits with other research
Haimson et al. (2009) first showed that passing equivalence tests changes ERP waveforms. Micah adds emotion to the story: the change now carries the feeling tone of the class.
Martins et al. (2023) swapped EEG for happy and sad music. They also saw emotion move to new stimuli, giving a behavioral echo of the same brain effect.
O’Connor et al. (2020) moved the idea into kids with autism. They taught emotion-person links through equivalence and saw the children derive new feelings without extra training. Micah’s EEG data help explain why that works: the brain treats equivalent stimuli as the same emotional cue.
Why it matters
You now have brain proof that equivalence classes carry emotional weight. When you teach a client to group a new token with a loved reinforcer, the token may automatically feel good. Watch for quick emotional shifts after equivalence probes; they can tell you the class is solid before the learner can say it.
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Join Free →After equivalence training, probe the new stimulus alone and watch for smiles or startle—quick emotion cues that the transfer worked.
02At a glance
03Original abstract
Emotional responses have specific electroencephalographic (EEG) signatures that arise within a few hundred milliseconds post-stimulus onset. In this experiment, EEG measures were employed to assess for transfer of emotional functions across three 3-member equivalence classes in an extension of Dougher, Auguston, Markham, Greenway, & Wulfert's (1994) seminal work on the transfer of arousal functions. Specifically, 12 human participants were trained in the following match-to-sample performances A1 = B1, A2 = B2, A3 = B3 and B1 = C1, B2 = C2, B3 = C3. After successfully testing for the emergence of symmetry relations (B1 = A1, B2 = A2, B3 = A3 and C1 = B1, C2 = B2, C3 = B3), visual images depicting emotionally positive and emotionally negative content were presented with A1 and A3, respectively, using a mixed stimulus pairing-compounding procedure. A2 was paired with emotionally neutral images. Next, EEG data were recorded as participants were exposed to a forced-choice recognition task with stimuli A1, B1, C1, A2, B2, C2, A3, B3, C3 and three novel stimuli A4, B4 and C4. Results yielded differential EEG effects for stimuli paired directly with emotional versus neutral images. Critically, differential EEG effects were also recorded across the C stimuli that were equivalently related to the A stimulus set. The EEG data coincide with previous reports of emotion-specific EEG effects, indicating that the initial emotional impact of a stimulus may emerge based on direct stimulus pairing and derived stimulus relations.
Journal of the experimental analysis of behavior, 2013 · doi:10.1002/jeab.19