Relating, orienting and evoking functions in an IRAP study involving emotional pictographs (emojis) used in electronic messages

Abstract The current study investigated the dynamics of arbitrarily applicable relational responding involving emotional pictographs (emojis) used in electronic messages by means of the Implicit Relational Assessment Procedure (IRAP). College students (N = 41) were trained to establish two classes of equivalent stimuli, each comprising a happy or an angry emoji, and three pseudo-words that presumably became symbols of the emotional pictographs. In a subsequent IRAP test, combinations of symbols (labels) and emojis (targets) generated four trial-types (with the consistent response within parentheses): happy symbol–happy emoji (true); happy symbol–negative emoji (false) negative symbol–happy emoji (false); and negative symbol–negative emoji (true), referred to as trial types 1, 2, 3, and 4 respectively. A positive score occurred only for trial-type 1 [happy symbol–happy emoji (true)]. Scores for trial-types 2 and 4 were close to zero, and the score for trial-type 3 [negative symbol-happy emoji (false)] was negative. This negative D-IRAP score means that participants were faster to respond true than false for the combination of negative symbol and happy emoji. These results are discussed in terms of the Differential Arbitrarily Applicable Relational Responding Effects (DAARRE) model. It is hypothesized that the orienting and evoking (functional) properties of the positive target stimulus (happy emoji) and the positive response option (true) had a stronger bearing on participants’ responding in trial type 3 than the relation between the label and target stimuli presented in this trial. We argue that the current study provides an empirical demonstration of a dissonant target trial type effect (DTTTE) that appeared to counter equivalence relations trained within the experimental session and discuss implications for IRAP research.