Kelly G. Wilson

Kelly G. Wilson
University of Mississippi | UM · Department of Psychology

PhD

About

101
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Publications

Publications (101)
Chapter
ACT ha abierto la puerta a descubrimientos fascinantes sobre el ser humano, el lenguaje y la psicopatología en general. Dentro de estos descubrimientos se encuentran las técnicas de tratamiento que componen ACT y que se presentan de forma muy convincente en este libro, Una Guía Práctica a la Terapia de Aceptación y Compromiso. Como describen los au...
Chapter
ACT ha abierto la puerta a descubrimientos fascinantes sobre el ser humano, el lenguaje y la psicopatología en general. Dentro de estos descubrimientos se encuentran las técnicas de tratamiento que componen ACT y que se presentan de forma muy convincente en este libro, Una Guía Práctica a la Terapia de Aceptación y Compromiso. Como describen los au...
Chapter
ACT ha abierto la puerta a descubrimientos fascinantes sobre el ser humano, el lenguaje y la psicopatología en general. Dentro de estos descubrimientos se encuentran las técnicas de tratamiento que componen ACT y que se presentan de forma muy convincente en este libro, Una Guía Práctica a la Terapia de Aceptación y Compromiso. Como describen los au...
Chapter
ACT ha abierto la puerta a descubrimientos fascinantes sobre el ser humano, el lenguaje y la psicopatología en general. Dentro de estos descubrimientos se encuentran las técnicas de tratamiento que componen ACT y que se presentan de forma muy convincente en este libro, Una Guía Práctica a la Terapia de Aceptación y Compromiso. Como describen los au...
Article
Acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT) in the context of its historical and progressive development unfolded within three phases over the past 40 years. Events and influences in an initial phase that culminated in the development of comprehensive distancing as a precursor to ACT in the early 1980s preceded philosophical, theoretical, and conceptua...
Chapter
El lenguaje humano y el uso que hacemos de él para comunicarnos o entender el mundo requiere derivar relaciones entre acontecimientos: por ejemplo, si A=B y A=C, entonces B=C. La teoría del marco relacional sostiene que esas interpretaciones son el núcleo de cualquier psicología del lenguaje y la cognición. Desde una edad muy temprana, los seres hu...
Chapter
El lenguaje humano y el uso que hacemos de él para comunicarnos o entender el mundo requiere derivar relaciones entre acontecimientos: por ejemplo, si A=B y A=C, entonces B=C. La teoría del marco relacional sostiene que esas interpretaciones son el núcleo de cualquier psicología del lenguaje y la cognición. Desde una edad muy temprana, los seres hu...
Article
Full-text available
Sexual racism has been linked to various negative health outcomes for men of color who have sex with men (MCSM). This article describes a sequence of two studies focused on creation of a scale measuring sexual racism, following established test construction methods in the field of psychology, and informed by intersectionality theory. We first defin...
Article
When individuals are engaging in behavior that is under aversive control, the behavior becomes relatively insensitive to changes in the environment except for escape or avoidance contingencies. Teaching individuals to increase behavioral and psychological flexibility in the presence of potentially aversive stimuli is a goal of Acceptance and Commit...
Article
Full-text available
Previous research has shown that individuals belonging to multiple marginalized groups experience higher levels of psychological distress, which is linked to experiencing discrimination based on their multiple marginalized identities. One way that gay and bisexual men of color face discrimination is in the dating and sexual situations within the me...
Article
Behavioral researchers are concluding that conventional group-based analyses often mask meaningful individual differences and do not necessarily map onto the change processes within the lives of individual humans. Hayes et al. (2018) have called for a renewed focus on idiographic research, but with methods capable of nuanced multivariate insights a...
Article
Body image research with men who have sex with men (MSM) has largely focused on White MSM. The current study aimed to investigate whether men of color who have sex with men (MCSM) report similar levels of body dissatisfaction as White MSM. We also studied whether (a) the experience of sexual racism, a unique stressor for MCSM, is related to body di...
Article
Full-text available
Recent research suggests that meaning in life relates to processes of social judgments and could facilitate relationships between racially diverse individuals. At this time however, there is no study that examines factors that influence the relationship between meaning, racial prejudice, and values. To fill this gap, the present study examined whet...
Article
Self-compassion has recently emerged as a component of psychological health. Research on self-compassion processes shows that self-compassion is related to lower levels of psychological distress and higher levels of positive affect. The current study examined the extent to which self-compassion is related to the quality of romantic relationships. U...
Article
Despite efforts to improve university retention, many low-income students are leaving college without a degree. The current study evaluated the preliminary effectiveness of Acceptance and Commitment Training for low-income students at risk for academic failure. In general, participants exhibited improved academic performance the following semester,...
Article
Full-text available
As coaching psychology finds its feet, demands for evidence-based approaches are increasing both from inside and outside of the industry. There is an opportunity in the many evidence-based interventions in other areas of applied psychology that are of direct relevance to coaching psychology. However, there may too be risks associated with unprincip...
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Full-text available
The current study developed the 60-item Multidimensional Psychological Flexibility Inventory (MPFI)—a scale assessing the 12 dimensions of the Hexaflex model. We created an exhaustive pool of 554 items including 22 of the most widely used measures from the acceptance and commitment therapy and mindfulness literatures. Exploratory and confirmatory f...
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Full-text available
Each year, hundreds of graduate students fail to match to an internship, preventing students from completing one of the final requirements for receiving a doctorate in professional psychology. Although several leaders in the field have weighed in on this serious issue, the perspectives of many key stakeholders in the internship imbalance—most notab...
Article
Full-text available
Introduction Relational frame theory contains a foundational assumption that coherence (i.e., making sense) is reinforcing for verbally competent humans. That is, it is assumed that humans relate ambiguous stimuli together because they have an extensive learning history where doing so resulted in both effective environmental action and socially med...
Article
This article explores some tensions between contextual behavioral science (CBS) and radical behaviorism or behavior analysis (BA)j, particularly with respect to the study of emotion. We contrast Darrow and Follette's (this issue) discussion of alexithymia from a radical behavioral perspective, which we view as representing a traditional behavior an...
Article
Full-text available
The present study pilot tested a mindfulness and acceptance-based work stress reduction intervention for intellectual disability staff. The intervention combined Acceptance and Commitment Training (ACT) with instruction in applied behavior analysis. This combined intervention was compared to a control condition consisting of applied behavior analys...
Article
Acceptance and mindfulness components are increasingly incorporated into treatment for eating disorders with promising results. The development of measures of proposed change processes would facilitate ongoing scientific progress. The current series of studies evaluated one such instrument, the Body Image-Acceptance and Action Questionnaire (BI-AAQ...
Article
Full-text available
The present article describes the nature, scope, and purpose of Contextual Behavioral Science (CBS). Emerging from behavioral psychology but expanding from those roots, CBS is based on contextual assumptions regarding the centrality of situated action, the nature of epistemology versus ontology, and a pragmatic truth criterion linked to the specifi...
Article
Data suggest that individuals dealing with a cancer diagnosis are less likely to suffer from depression, anxiety, and psychological distress when they cope with their condition from a stance of emotional and cognitive acceptance (e.g. Dunkel, et al., 1992; Stanton, et al., 2000). Although traditional CBT often includes some acceptance-oriented elem...
Conference Paper
“Psychopathy” is a term that has been used to describe individuals who have difficulties taking on the perspective of others (e.g. lacking empathy, guilt), persistently engage in socially deviant behavior harmful to others, and fail to modify behavior in response to consequences meant to function as punishers. Given frequent use of the term “psycho...
Article
Acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT) has been shown to have broad applicability to different diagnostic groups, and there are theoretical reasons to consider its use with clients with chronic mental health problems. We report an innovative treatment development evaluation of ACT for a heterogeneous group of "treatment-resistant clients" (N= 10)...
Chapter
Acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT) has emerged as an innovative member of the broad family of cognitive behavior therapies (CBTs). To understand the place of mindfulness in ACT, it is necessary to understand the place of ACT within the broader CBT family. This chapter locates ACT within the CBT tradition and highlights similarities and differe...
Article
While agonist replacement therapies are effective for managing opioid dependence, community treatment programs are increasingly choosing detoxification. Unfortunately, success rates for opioid detoxification are very low, in part, due to physical and psychological symptoms associated with opioid withdrawal. Few behavior therapies specifically addre...
Article
Full-text available
Introduces this special issue of Behavior Analyst Today, which focuses on behavior analysis and education. Behavior analysis and education are a natural fit. Basic behavioral principles are ideal tools for teaching. All applied behavior analytic interventions with humans fall under the education umbrella in a general sense, since they are aimed at...
Book
Since the original publication of this seminal work, acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT) has come into its own as a widely practiced approach to helping people change. This book provides the definitive statement of ACT—from conceptual and empirical foundations to clinical techniques—written by its originators. ACT is based on the idea that psyc...
Article
Full-text available
The present study examines whether facilitated acquisition occurs in contexts when 1 stimulus in a class is emotionally evocative and the other stimuli are arbitrary or neutral. Undergraduates with high and low grade-point averages (GPA) completed a matching-to-sample task that resulted in the formation of 3 stimulus equivalence classes. Each class...
Article
Full-text available
The Implicit Relational Assessment Procedure (IRAP) is a relatively new measure of implicit cognition that tests cognition as relational behavior instead of an associative activity and thus may provide a more specific measure of cognitive repertoires, including those for social biases, than better known implicit measures such as the Implicit Associ...
Article
Full-text available
A number of cognitive-behavior therapies now strongly emphasize particular behavioral processes as mediators of clinical change specific to that therapy. This shift in emphasis calls for the development of measures sensitive to chang-es in the therapies' processes. Among these is acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT), which posits valued living a...
Article
This study aimed to isolate the conditions under which aversive stimulation is experienced as more or less discomforting/unpleasant. Discomfort was induced by playing loud noises through headphones while participants performed computer tasks. We employed 4 main conditions. Condition 1: the acceptance-based protocol (ACT), intended to integrate disc...
Article
Full-text available
Thirty-two subjects completed 2 stimulus equivalence tasks using a matching-to-sample paradigm. One task involved direct reinforcement of conditional discriminations designed to produce derived relations between self-referring stimuli (e.g., me, myself, I) and positive evaluation words (e.g., whole, desirable, perfect). The other task was designed...
Book
Full-text available
You can spend years in graduate school, internship, and clinical practice. You can learn to skillfully conceptualize cases and structure interventions for your clients. You can have every skill and advantage as a therapist, but if you want to make the most of every session, both you and your client need to show up in the therapy room. Really show u...
Article
Many clients who undergo methadone maintenance (MM) treatment for heroin and other opiate dependence prefer abstinence from methadone. Attempts at methadone detoxification are often unsuccessful, however, due to distressing physical as well as psychological symptoms. Outcomes from a MM client who voluntarily participated in an Acceptance and Commit...
Article
This study investigated the impact of defusion on a nonclinical sample (n = 60) in the context of negative (e.g., "I am a bad person") and positive (e.g., "I am whole") self-statements. Participants were assigned to one of three experimental conditions (Pro-Defusion, Anti-Defusion, and Neutral) that manipulated instructions about the impact of a de...
Article
Full-text available
The purpose of this study was to investigate the transformation of stimulus functions from socially relevant to arbitrary stimuli as a model of social stigmatization and categorization. Specifically, participants were trained to respond to arbitrary stimuli as if they were obese or thin stimuli via a matching-to-sample preparation. The impact of th...
Article
Full-text available
Conducting studies using an undergraduate participant pool is fraught with difficulties. Among them are problems with adequately motivating subjects both to come to the study, and once there, to actively engage the experimental task. Thirty-one college students participated in a matching-to-sample (MTS) study involving substantial training, testing...
Article
Full-text available
A significant percentage of individuals attempting smoking cessation lapse within a matter of days, and very few are able to recover to achieve long-term abstinence. This observation suggests that many smokers may have quit-attempt histories characterized exclusively by early lapses to smoking following quit attempts. Recent negative-reinforcement...
Article
Full-text available
This study investigated the relationship between parenting stress and relational conditioning. Fourteen students who were not mothers, 14 mothers who reported high parenting stress and 14 mothers with low parenting stress completed two matching-to-sample (MTS) computer tasks, each requiring formation of three 3-member classes. The first MTS task ex...
Data
Full-text available
We are all whole, complete, and perfect regardless of the circumstances or present-ing problem (Murrell, 2006). This is the major assumption that has guided our work in the schools and will organize the work in this chapter. All of our work in educa-tional settings has been guided by a sincere appreciation of the individual and his or her own behav...
Article
Full-text available
Early writing paradigm studies suggested that people who write about emotional or traumatic events accrue psychological and physiological benefits. However, recent studies suggest that a number of variables may play a role in determining when, and for whom, writing is beneficial. The current study examined the impact of experimenter demeanor in thi...
Article
Full-text available
The present study examined the impact of a group treatment protocol based on Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) that was tailored toward the avoidant behaviors and life problems typical for socially anxious persons. Twenty-two participants enrolled in the group treatment, which consisted of 10 sessions. Twelve participants completed treatment....
Article
Full-text available
Thirty-two subjects completed 2 stimulus equivalence tasks using a matching-to-sample paradigm. One task involved direct reinforcement of conditional discriminations designed to produce derived relations between self-referring stimuli (e.g., me, myself, 1) and positive evaluation words (e.g., whole, desirable, perfect). The other task was designed...
Article
Full-text available
The purpose of this paper is to describe the use of therapeutic paradox within the contextual-behavioral treatment called Acceptance and Commitment Therapy. Emphasis is on the difference between inherent and constructed paradox, expanding on previous work and emphasizing Acceptance and Commitment Therapy's relationship to Logotherapy.
Article
The purpose of this paper is to describe the use of therapeutic paradox within the contextual-behavioral treatment called Acceptance and Commitment Therapy. Emphasis is on the difference between inherent and constructed paradox, expanding on previous work and emphasizing Acceptance and Commitment Therapy's relationship to Logotherapy.
Article
Full-text available
Traditional behavioral accounts of impaired parenting have done much to elucidate the specific behavioral interactions between parents and children that play a role in developing and maintaining child misbehavior. Several highly praised behavioral treatments demonstrating efficacy across certain parent populations have been developed based on these...
Article
The present study compared methadone maintenance alone to methadone maintenance in combination with 16 weeks of either Intensive Twelve-Step Facilitation (ITSF) or Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) in a preliminary efficacy trial with polysubstance-abusing opiate addicts who were continuing to use drugs while on methadone maintenance. Results...
Article
Approximately 14% of the working-age Swedish population are either on long-term sick leave or early retirement due to disability. Substantial increase of sick listing, reports of work disabilities and early retirement due to stress and musculoskeletal chronic pain suggest a need for methods of preventing loss of function resulting from these condit...
Article
Full-text available
The present study describes the development of a short, general measure of experiential avoidance, based on a specific theoretical approach to this process. A theoretically driven iterative exploratory analysis using structural equation modeling on data from a clinical sample yielded a single factor comprising 9 items, A fully confirmatory factor a...
Article
Full-text available
One of logotherapy's strengths lies in its openness to integration with other forms of psychotherapy. Logotherapy is often described as humanistic/existential. However, it has elements that are consistent with other paradigms. The purpose of this paper is to compare and contrast logotherapy with a recent and expanding contextual-behavioral treatmen...
Data
Full-text available
In contrast to the growing empirical support for ACT interventions with adult problems and populations, ACT applications with children, adolescents, and their parents are in relatively early stages of development. Our preliminary data, and data from other sites, suggest that ACT and its components can be successfully adapted for children in develop...
Chapter
The purpose of this chapter is to present a consolidated overview of ACT treatment interventions and therapy processes. In Chapter 1 we described the philosophy, basic theory, applied theory and the theoretical processes that collectively define ACT as a clinical system. In this chapter we will examine the concrete clinical steps used in implementi...
Chapter
Because ACT is a contextual treatment, your attempts to conceptualize a presenting problem might be different from traditional case conceptualization models. The most important principle in contextual analysis is that you are not just assessing a particular symptom with a particular topography; you are also attempting to understand the functional i...
Chapter
Drug dependence and abuse have reached epidemic proportions. The 2002 National Survey on Drug Use and Health (NSDUH) estimated that 22 million or 9.4% of Americans over age 12 meet diagnostic criterion for substance dependence or abuse. The individual and social costs of drug and alcohol addiction are staggering. The total indirect costs of alcohol...
Article
Full-text available
Understanding the processes and principles that underlie mindfulness is a needed step, because this method enters into the armamentarium of empirical clinical psychology. Mindfulness is closely related to several procedures, including acceptance, cognitive defusion, and exposure. Although each of these procedures seems to target different behaviora...
Book
La terapia de aceptación y compromiso (ACT) es una forma de psicoterapia experiencial conductual y cognitiva basada en la teoría del marco relacional del lenguaje y la condición humana. Se trata de una terapia novedosa que ha probado su efectividad en un amplio rango de trastornos psicológicos y cuyo elemento central es el trastorno de evitación ex...
Article
Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) views cognition and emotion differently in their roles in psychological problems. Both popular culture and many models of psychopathology conceive of negative thoughts and emotions as states that must be eliminated, reduced, or supplanted. ACT posits that these negative emotional, cognitive, and bodily states...
Article
Full-text available
Contemporary contextual behavioral analyses take a somewhat different view of theorizing than is commonly held in most of psychology. In formulating a natural science of behavior, theorists such as J. R. Kantor and B. F. Skinner rejected certain varieties of theoretical constructs. This paper divides theoretical constructs into abstractive and hypo...
Article
The problem of explaining the growth of knowledge has a long history among philosophers. David Hume rejected a logic of knowledge amplification and offered a psychological, rather than a logical, solution. Hume's naturalistic account can be made more powerful and precise by adopting the principles of contemporary learning theory. Until recently, ho...
Article
The issue of behavioral covariation has been a topic of interest to behavior analysts for many years. Many writers have used the term response generalization interchangeably with behavioral covariation. In this paper, we argue from the extant literature that the term "response generalization" should be used to describe only very specific occasions...
Article
Full-text available
Behavioral science research has appeared to conflict with the 12-step treatment approach, which is the prevalent practice in the treatment of addictions in the United States. Compatibilities between 12-step and Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, a contextual behavioral treatment, are explored with the aim of reducing this friction and better servin...
Article
Full-text available
Behavior analysis has long accepted the legitimacy of the analysis of private events in a natural science of behavior. However, the topic has languished as a focus of empirical research in either applied or basic arenas. We argue that recent empirical work examining the bidirectional nature of verbal relations may shed light on the role of private...
Book
Human beings use language to shape their world: to structure it and give it meaning. Language builds our skyscrapers, imparts the strength to our steel, creates the elegance of our mathematics, and forms our art’s depiction of beauty. Language has been the source of so much human achievement that it is only natural that we look to it first to ident...
Book
An ACT Approach Chapter 1. What is Acceptance and Commitment Therapy? Steven C. Hayes, Kirk D. Strosahl, Kara Bunting, Michael Twohig, and Kelly G. Wilson Chapter 2. An ACT Primer: Core Therapy Processes, Intervention Strategies, and Therapist Competencies. Kirk D. Strosahl, Steven C. Hayes, Kelly G. Wilson and Elizabeth V. Gifford Chapter 3. ACT C...
Chapter
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One of the most important philosophical criticisms leveled at behaviorism is that it lacks the tools required for an analysis of the first-person perspective (Malcolm, 1963, see Day, 1977/1992; Lycan, 1990; Rorty, 1994). If this criticism were valid, it would indeed be a grave, if not fatal, flaw. No psychological perspective, not even the behavior...
Article
Full-text available
Historically, anxiety has been a dominant subject in mainstream psychology but an incidental or even insignificant one in behavior analysis. We discuss several reasons for this discrepancy. We follow with a behavior-analytic conceptualization of anxiety that could just as easily be applied to emotion in general. Its primary points are (a) that lang...
Article
The behavior therapy movement has led psychology in the development of empirically validated treatment approaches. Three features of the behavior therapy movement distinguish it from other applied approaches and have contributed to its success: (a) defining problems in terms of identifiable behavioral excesses and deficits, (b) derivation of treatm...
Article
Barlow (1997) reminds us of the revolutionary beginnings of the behavior therapy movement, and points to the need for broader dissemination of our treatments. In this commentary, changes in health care delivery are examined, along with the role of doctoral-level psychologists within the emerging health care system. With behavior therapy's history o...
Article
The issue of cognition has often been divisive among behavior therapists. Typically the debate has centered around the causal status of cognition. Cognitive psychologists have argued for the causal efficacy of cognition, while behavior analysts have argued against it. These disputes are not entirely empirical matters. In part, they reflect irreconc...
Article
Barlow (1997) reminds us of the revolutionary beginnings of the behavior therapy movement, and points to the need for broader dissemination of our treatments. In this commentary, changes in health care delivery are examined, along with the role of doctoral-level psychologists within the emerging health care system. With behavior therapy's history o...
Article
Full-text available
The chapter discusses stimulus classes and stimulus relations. Humans show remarkable forms of stimulus control based upon seemingly arbitrary relations among stimuli. Normal adults who are told that a bottle contains poison will probably avoid that bottle, perhaps for life. The research interest in equivalence and other derived stimulus relations...
Article
Full-text available
Resurgence has been shown in human and nonhuman operant behavior, but not in derived relational responses. The present study examined this issue. Twenty-three undergraduates were trained to make conditional discriminations in a three-choice matching-to-sample paradigm. The training resulted in three equivalence classes, each consisting of four arbi...
Article
Full-text available
Syndromal classification is a well-developed diagnostic system but has failed to deliver on its promise of the identification of functional pathological processes. Functional analysis is tightly connected to treatment but has failed to develop testable, replicable classification systems. Functional diagnostic dimensions are suggested as a way to de...
Article
Two recent publications by Boelens and Sidman examined the weaknesses in Relational Frame Theory. This paper responds to those criticisms. We argue that Relational Frame Theory offers a very similar but more general account than Boelens, and that Sidman is incorrect in arguing a priori that equivalencing cannot be learned by exemplars. Preparation...
Article
Cognitive and behavioral psychology have long debated the merits of cognitive causality in the explanation of human behavior. We argue, however, that cognitive causality must be understood in the context of the pre-analytic philosophical assumptions of the scientist, not merely as an empirical matter. Many of the issues that seemingly separate cogn...