Volume 12, April 2019, Pages 322-328.
Authors:
Benjamin G. Pierce and Michael E. Levin
Abstract:
Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) takes a functional perspective on behavior and supports clients in responding in values consistent ways to their internal experiences. The capacity to notice and label the functions of one's ongoing behavior may be an important skill in functional interventions such as ACT, which may facilitate other facets of these interventions. However, this skill has never been assessed as a potentially relevant behavioral process. The ability to notice and label the functions of one's behavior may be defined as tacting of the function of behavior, because it involves providing a verbal response (a label) to a non-verbal aspect of one's experience. This report details the development and preliminary psychometric properties of a 10-item self-report measure of the ability to label or 'tact' different functions of behavior that may be pertinent within ACT.The preliminary findings suggest that tacting of function can be measured in an internally consistent way and explains variance in symptoms and functional impairment beyond a commonly used process measure. Altogether, the present findings suggest tacting of function may be relevant within ACT and other functional interventions, and point to the role of deficits in tacting function in the emergence of mental health problems.