THE ROLE OF RULE-GOVERNED BEHAVIOR IN HISTRIONIC AND COMPULSIVE PERSONALITY DISORDERS

摘要

Behavioral descriptions of the histrionic and compulsive personality disorders as well as cognitive and bio-social learning theories of these disorders appear to be consistent with the hypothesis that these disorders might be related to dysfunctional rule-governed behavior. Specifically, it was suggested that the histrionic personality disorder might be related to deficits in rule-governed behavior, while the compulsive personality disorder might be related to excesses in rule-governed behavior. It was further hypothesized that rule-governed behavior among compulsive subjects would increase in the presence of punishment contingencies.;College students who showed predominantly histrionic or compulsive personality styles on the Millon Clinical Multiaxial Inventory and control subjects were trained on an operant task involving a multiple schedule in one of two rule conditions (Positive Only vs. Positive Plus Response Cost). Following training, there was an extinction phase to determine whether apparent schedule responding was actually under the control of rules.;Results indicated an effect of diagnosis upon sensitivity to extinction, with histrionics showing the highest sensitivity to extinction and compulsives showing the lowest sensitivity to extinction. These findings were consistent with the experimental hypothesis that compulsives would show more rule-governed behavior than histrionics or control subjects, while histrionics would show greater control by direct contingencies of the behavior than either compulsives or control subjects. There were no significant main effects of type of rule or significant interactions between diagnosis and type of rule. Thus, the hypothesis that compulsives alone would show greater insensitivity to extinction in a punishment condition than when only positive outcomes are involved was not supported. Protocol analysis of concurrent verbalizations did not support rule-governed behavior as the mechanism for diagnostic differences in sensitivity to extinction since compulsives did not show higher proportions of rule statements than histrionic or control statements. While lack of diagnostic differences in rule statements does not permit the exclusion of other theoretical interpretations of the present results, the possibility of differences in rule-governed behavior cannot be discounted on the basis of the present study since this analysis dealt only with the form rather than the function of concurrent verbalizations.