Jamie Cummins

• PhD
• Senior Postdoc at University of Bern

The Affect Misattribution Procedure (AMP) is used in many areas of psychological science based on the assumption that it not only taps into attitudes and biases but does so without a person’s awareness. Across eight preregistered studies (N = 1603) plus meta-analyses we reexamined the ‘implicitness’ of AMP effects, and in particular, the idea that...

Relational Frame Theory (RFT, S. C. Hayes et al., 2001) predicts that some topographies of relational responding should map onto one another more closely than others. By extension, training one type of relational responding should differentially improve other relational responses as a function of their relatedness to the trained relation. We invest...

We explore the idea that some learning phenomena can be thought of as instances of relational behavior, more specifically arbitrarily applicable relational responding (AARR). After explaining the nature of AARR, we discuss what it means to say that learning phenomena such as evaluative and fear conditioning are instances of AARR. We then list sever...

Psychologists increasingly recognize the importance of relational responding in understanding human behavior. As a result, there is the growing need for good measures of relational responding. One promising measure is the Relational Abilities Index (RAI). However, its measurement properties have not been explored in-depth. There is little understan...

Implicit attitude measures are widely used across many fields of psychological science. One core goal of these measures is to provide precise information which can be diagnostic of an individual person's attitude. To date, little progress has been made towards this goal. We argue that this is because psychologists have not yet even quantified indiv...

We report two studies on the idea that self-reported gut feelings provide a direct measure of implicit evaluations (i.e., spontaneous feelings) and thus an alternative for implicit measures such as the Implicit Association Test (IAT).

In psychological science, replicability—repeating a study with a new sample achieving consistent results (Parsons et al., 2022)—is critical for affirming the validity of scientific findings. Despite its importance, replication efforts are few and far between in psychological science with many attempts failing to corroborate past findings. This scar...

In psychological science, replicability—repeating a study with a new sampleachieving consistent results (Parsons et al., 2022)—is critical for affirming the validity of scientific findings. Despite its importance, replication efforts are few and far between in psychological science with many attempts failing to corroborate past findings. This scarc...

Research on implicit theories of intelligence (a.k.a. intelligence mindset) has shown that endorsing a stronger growth mindset (the belief that intelligence can be improved) is adaptive in the face of difficulties. Although the theory presumes implicit processes (i.e., unaware beliefs, guiding behaviors and actions automatically), the concept is ty...

Many researchers have tackled the question of how behavior is influenced by its outcomes. Some have adopted a non-mechanistic (functional) perspective that aims to describe the impact of outcomes on behavior. Others have adopted a mechanistic (cognitive) perspective that aims to explain the impact of outcomes on behavior. Orthogonal to this distinc...

Psychologists increasingly recognize the importance of relational responding in understanding human behavior. As a result, there is the growing need for good measures of relational responding. One promising measure is the Relational Abilities Index (RAI). However, its measurement properties have not been explored in-depth. There is little understan...

Research on implicit theories of intelligence (a.k.a. intelligence mindset) has shown that a growth mindset (the belief that intelligence can be improved) is adaptive in the face of challenges and setbacks. Even though the theory presumes implicit processes (i.e., people are supposed to be unaware of these beliefs, guiding behaviors and actions aut...

This article provides a comprehensive overview of the development of a behavior-analytic alternative to the popular implicit association test (IAT), namely, the function acquisition speed test (FAST). The IAT appears, prima facia , to indirectly assess participants’ learning histories with regard to the categorization of stimuli. However, its origi...

Background and aims: ABC-training is a new intervention to encourage health behavior change that targets the automatic activation of adaptive beliefs (i.e. automatic inferences). The aim of this proof-of-principle study was to test the effectiveness of web-based ABC-training to change outcome expectancies of alcohol drinking in a sample of hazardo...

The current study served to replicate the finding that extensive derived relational responding fluency training using the SMART (strengthening mental abilities with relational training) method can enhance intelligence quotient scores, while controlling for baseline levels of intelligence and attentional skills. Two separate groups of children based...

Effects on the Affect Misattribution Procedure (AMP) have been claimed to be implicit in the sense of being unaware but the evidence for this remains to be weak. Recently, Kurdi et al. (2022) provided a new method of testing this: they argue the absence of a construct-irrelevant individual difference factor would represent supportive evidence for t...

It is important that scientists reflect on their scientific aims and on how to achieve those aims. The report of the ACBS Task Force on the strategies and tactics of CBS research is an important document in that it provides explicit recommendations on what is needed to realize the aims of CBS. In this invited commentary on the report, we reflect on...

Evidence increasingly suggests that information about the relation between stimuli can impact responses on implicit measures. Relational implicit measures have been developed to assess such relational information. Such measures provide important theoretical insights for social psychology, since different relations between stimuli may give rise to v...

This initiative examined systematically the extent to which a large set of archival research findings generalizes across contexts. We repeated the key analyses for 29 original strategic management effects in the same context (direct reproduction) as well as in 52 novel time periods and geographies; 45% of the reproductions returned results matching...

Background and aims Social media use can sometimes become excessive and damaging. To deal with this issue, scholars and practitioners have called for the development of measures that predict social media use. The current studies test the utility of evaluation and self-identification measures for predicting social media use. Method Study 1 examined...

Some learning psychologists refer to relational cues (Crels) and functional cues (Cfuncs) in their analyses of verbal behavior. However, past research about Crels and Cfuncs is limited in two ways. First, there has been relatively little research into how Crels and Cfunc functions can be acquired, and whether such acquisition is similar to the acqu...

Researchers commonly use the Implicit Association Test (IAT) to assess the automatic attitudes of individuals and groups. Although contended by some, the IAT is used in large part due to its psychometric properties, which are generally superior relative to most other measures of automatic cognition. Much focus has therefore been dedicated to the IA...

The measurement of automatic attitudes towards sleep, in addition to reflective self-reports, might improve our ability to predict and explain sleep-hindering practices. Two types of implicit association tests (IATs), a sleep-related evaluations IAT and a sleep-related self-identity IAT, were developed to evaluate their efficacy for assessing autom...

Research on automatic stereotyping is dominated by the idea that automatic stereotyping reflects the activation of (group-trait) associations. In two preregistered experiments (total N=391) we tested predictions derived from an alternative perspective that suggests that automatic stereotyping is the result of the activation of propositional represe...

Research on automatic stereotyping is dominated by the idea that automatic stereotyping reflects the activation of (group-trait) associations. In two preregistered experiments (total N=391) we tested predictions derived from an alternative perspective that suggests that automatic stereotyping is the result of the activation of propositional represe...

How can we maximize what is learned from a replication study? In the creative destruction approach to replication, the original hypothesis is compared not only to the null hypothesis, but also to predictions derived from multiple alternative theoretical accounts of the phenomenon. To this end, new populations and measures are included in the design...

How can we maximize what is learned from a replication study? In the creative destruction approach to replication, the original hypothesis is compared not only to the null hypothesis, but also to predictions derived from multiple alternative theoretical accounts of the phenomenon. To this end, new populations and measures are included in the design...

How can we maximize what is learned from a replication study? In the creative destruction approach to replication, the original hypothesis is compared not only to the null hypothesis, but also to predictions derived from multiple alternative theoretical accounts of the phenomenon. To this end, new populations and measures are included in the design...

The assessment of the thoughts and evaluations of human beings is a central feature of modern psychological science. Further to this, many researchers are specifically interested in the automatic thoughts and evaluations of individuals. To assess automatic thoughts and evaluations, researchers typically use a range of measurement procedures whose o...

The assessment of the thoughts and evaluations of human beings is a central feature of modern psychological science. Further to this, many researchers are specifically interested in the automatic thoughts and evaluations of individuals. To assess automatic thoughts and evaluations, researchers typically use a range of measurement procedures whose o...

Objective Implicit and explicit drinking self-identity appear to be useful in predicting alcohol-related outcomes. However, there are several different implicit and explicit measures which can be used to assess drinking self-identity. Some of these implicit measures can also capture relational information (e.g., I am a drinker, I should be a drink...

The Propositional Evaluation Paradigm (PEP; Müller and Rothermund, 2019) has recently shown promise as a relational implicit measure (i.e., an implicit measure which can specify how stimuli are related). Whereas the standard PEP measures response times, mousetracking is becoming increasingly-popular for quantifying response competition, with distin...

Increasing evidence suggests that the relatedness of stimuli within the Function Acquisition Speed Test (FAST) methodology is sensitive to the learning histories of participants. For example, this method is sensitive to differences in the amount of baseline training provided toestablish stimulus equivalence relations using arbitrary stimuli (Cummin...

For more than twenty-five years implicit measures have shaped research, theorizing, and intervention in psychological science. During this period, the development and deployment of implicit measures have been predicated on a number of theoretical, methodological, and applied assumptions. Yet these assumptions are frequently violated and rarely met....

An increasing body of evidence shows the importance of accommodating relational information within implicit measures of psychological constructs. Whereas relational variants of the Implicit Association Test (IAT) have been proposed in the past, we put forward the Truth Misattribution Procedure (TMP) as a relational variant of the Affect Misattribut...

The Affect Misattribution Procedure has attracted considerable attention and use in psychological science as a measure of evaluations, attitudes, and biases. The AMP’s appeal to researchers is based in large part on the promise that it taps into unintentional and unaware (i.e., implicit) psychological processes. However, past claims about the impli...

Increasing evidence suggests that the Function Acquisition Speed Test (FAST) is capable of measuring differences in stimulus relatedness, both in experimental and real-world contexts. In experimental contexts, FAST scores have been shown to change commensurate to differences in the relatedness of stimuli, as controlled by the amount of training pro...

An increasing body of evidence shows the importance of accommodating relational information within implicit measures of psychological constructs. Whereas relational variants of the Implicit Association Test (IAT) have been proposed in the past, we put forward the Truth Misattribution Procedure (TMP) as a relational variant of the Affect Misattribut...

The Function Acquisition Speed Test (FAST) has shown recent evidence as an effective tool for the quantification of stimulus relatedness. The current study assessed the potential of the FAST in measuring the effects of the presentation of positively or negatively valenced messages on relatedness between stimulus relations with regard to safe-sex be...

The Function Acquisition Speed Test (FAST) has shown recent evidence as an effective tool for the quantification of stimulus relatedness. The current study assessed the potential of the FAST in measuring the effects of the presentation of positively- or negatively valenced messages on relatedness between stimulus relations with regard to safe sex b...

Implicit measures have been hypothesized to allow researchers to ascertain the existence and strength of relations between stimuli, often in the context of research on attitudes. However, little controlled behavioral research has focused on whether stimulus relations, and the degree of relatedness within such relations, are indexed by implicit meas...

Implicit testing procedures have become highly prevalent in recent years in both social-cognitive and behaviour-analytic domains as a means of assessing associations between stimuli. In spite of this, comparably little conceptual research has been conducted to investigate the nature of the scores produced by these tests using experimentally-control...