BA200 Unit 4 Mentalism Paper Example

Forty Session Notes and the Word Frustrated: A BA200 Unit 4 Mentalism Paper

[Student Name]

Purdue University Global

BA200: Conceptual Foundations of Applied Behavior Analysis

Unit 4 Mentalism Paper

[Instructor Name]

[Date]

The writer, the clinic, its notes and the children are composite; the sources cited are real.

The Audit

My job is direct therapy with young children at a behavior analysis clinic on Colorado's Western Slope. Every session ends with a short written note. As a course exercise, and with my supervisor's permission, I read forty recent notes written by six technicians, including me, with identifying details removed. I was looking for one thing: sentences that explained a child's behavior by something inside the child.

I found them in twenty-three of the forty notes. The most common were frustrated, which appeared eleven times, as in "Mateo bit a peer because he was frustrated." Others included "she didn't feel like working," "he wanted attention," "she was being stubborn" and, once, "he was trying to manipulate staff." My own notes were not much better than anyone else's, which was humbling to discover.

What Mentalism Is

Mentalism, in the behaviorist sense, is the practice of explaining behavior by inner states or events, such as feelings, intentions, wishes or traits, treated as causes. Skinner (1974) did not deny that people have feelings or that they can report them. His objection was to the explanatory role given to them. When we say a child bit because he was frustrated, we usually know he was frustrated only because he bit, or because of circumstances that also explain the biting. The feeling is inferred from the behavior and then used to explain it.

Skinner (1950) called such inferred causes into question even when they are dressed in scientific language, arguing that explanations at another level of description often add a step without adding understanding. The danger is that the explanation feels complete. Once a note says "frustrated," no one asks what happened next.

The word frustrated in a session note sounds like an explanation, but it ends the inquiry at the exact point where the useful questions begin.

Private Events Are Not the Problem

The critique is easy to misread as a claim that feelings do not matter. Radical behaviorism treats private events as real behavior or stimuli that can be part of an analysis (Skinner, 1945). Moore (2008) emphasizes that the target of the critique is not privacy but mentalism: the move from a private event to an autonomous inner cause that is not itself explained by anything in the person's history or environment.

That distinction matters for a clinic. If a child says "I'm mad," that statement is data. It tells us something about how the child is responding to a situation and can become part of the plan, for example by teaching a way to ask for help. What the critique rules out is stopping there, as if anger were a sufficient cause.

Rewriting the Notes

I rewrote each of the twenty-three sentences in terms of antecedents, behavior and consequences, using information from the same session's data sheets. "Mateo bit a peer because he was frustrated" became "During circle time, after the third song request, Mateo bit the peer beside him; staff removed him from the circle." "She didn't feel like working" became "When the tablet was put away and the matching task was presented, Ava pushed materials off the table four times; each time staff paused the task to clean up." "He wanted attention" became "When staff turned to another child, Owen called out; staff turned back and talked with him each time."

Two things happened in the rewriting. First, about a third of the rewritten notes immediately suggested a hypothesis about function. Removal from circle after biting suggests escape. Pausing the task to clean up suggests escape again. Turning back to Owen suggests attention. Second, several notes could not be rewritten because the data sheet lacked the information, which showed that the mentalistic sentence had been standing in for observation that had not been done at all.

Talking With Parents

The audit raised a related issue: how we talk with families. Parents often explain their child's behavior in mentalistic terms, and for good reason. A mother who says her son hits his sister because he is jealous is describing something real about her family. When I first started, I would gently correct parents with behavioral language, which mostly made them feel lectured. My supervisor taught me a better approach: accept the parent's word, then ask about the moments around it. "When he gets jealous, what usually happens right before? And what happens after he hits her?" Parents answer those questions readily, and their answers become the same kind of data the rewritten notes contain. The critique of mentalism works best as a habit of asking, not a correction of other people's words.

Why It Matters in Practice

Baum (2017) argues that behaviorist explanations should be judged by their usefulness. By that standard, mentalistic notes fail in three ways. They point to causes that staff cannot change directly; no one can reach inside a child and remove frustration. They can shift blame to the child, especially words like stubborn or manipulative, which describe the child's character rather than the situation. And they hide patterns that the next technician needs.

There is a fair objection. Some mentalistic words work as shorthand. When an experienced behavior analyst says a child "wants attention," she may mean that a functional analysis has shown attention maintains the behavior. The problem is not the word but whether it rests on data. In our clinic's notes, it usually did not.

What Changed

After I shared the audit, my supervisor added three prompts to the note template: what happened just before, what the child did, and what happened right after. The word frustrated has not disappeared, but it now usually appears with the events that surrounded it. Two technicians told me the new template made notes faster to write because they no longer had to search for the right word to describe a child's state.

Conclusion

The behaviorist critique of mentalism does not deny inner life. It objects to treating inner states as causes that end an explanation. In forty session notes, that habit was common, and replacing it with descriptions of what happened before and after turned vague sentences into hypotheses a team could test. The critique, applied in a clinic, is less a philosophical position than a way of writing notes that lead somewhere.

References

Baum, W. M. (2017). Understanding behaviorism: Behavior, culture, and evolution (3rd ed.). Wiley-Blackwell.

Moore, J. (2008). Conceptual foundations of radical behaviorism. Sloan Publishing.

Skinner, B. F. (1945). The operational analysis of psychological terms. Psychological Review, 52(5), 270-277. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0062535

Skinner, B. F. (1950). Are theories of learning necessary? Psychological Review, 57(4), 193-216. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0054367

Skinner, B. F. (1974). About behaviorism. Knopf.