The emergence of transitive relations between stimuli that had never been directly paired with one another can be examined through a phenomenon called Transitive Inference (TI). The present experiment explored contextually controlled TI effects in verbally able humans. Specifically, participants were trained in the conditional discriminations A1+B1-, B1+ C1-, C1+D1-, D1+E1-, E1+F1-, F1+G1-and G1+H1-in the presence of a cue (Cue 1), followed by tests for mutual and combinatorial entailment in the presence of either Cue 1 or Cue 2. Note that Cue 1 and Cue 2 had been previously established as functionally equivalent to happier-than and unhappier-than contexts, respectively. Using a performancebased measure of Bimplicit preferences,^we predicted that successfully demonstrating entailment would yield a performance indicating C1 as more positively valenced than F1. Similarly, if participants learned the discriminations A2+B2-, B2+C2-, C2+D2-, D2+E2-, E2+F2-, F2+G2-, G2+H2-in the presence of Cue 2 only, followed by tests for entailment in the presence of both Cues 1 and 2, we predicted that C2 should be responded to as more negatively valenced than F2. Performances across both conditions supported these predictions, furthering the evidence for the claim that emotional valences can be derived through functionally transitive stimulus-stimulus relations.

Emotional responses have specific electroencephalographic (EEG) signatures that arise within a few hundred milliseconds post-stimulus onset. In this experiment, EEG measures were employed to assess for transfer of emotional functions across three 3-member equivalence classes in an extension of Dougher, Auguston, Markham, Greenway, & Wulfert's (1994) seminal work on the transfer of arousal functions. Specifically, 12 human participants were trained in the following match-to-sample performances A1 = B1, A2 = B2, A3 = B3 and B1 = C1, B2 = C2, B3 = C3. After successfully testing for the emergence of symmetry relations (B1 = A1, B2 = A2, B3 = A3 and C1 = B1, C2 = B2, C3 = B3), visual images depicting emotionally positive and emotionally negative content were presented with A1 and A3, respectively, using a mixed stimulus pairing-compounding procedure. A2 was paired with emotionally neutral images. Next, EEG data were recorded as participants were exposed to a forced-choice recognition task with stimuli A1, B1, C1, A2, B2, C2, A3, B3, C3 and three novel stimuli A4, B4 and C4. Results yielded differential EEG effects for stimuli paired directly with emotional versus neutral images. Critically, differential EEG effects were also recorded across the C stimuli that were equivalently related to the A stimulus set. The EEG data coincide with previous reports of emotion-specific EEG effects, indicating that the initial emotional impact of a stimulus may emerge based on direct stimulus pairing and derived stimulus relations.

When attempting to encourage eating, explicitly providing statements like “eating is pleasant” may produce little effect. This may be due to subjective, negatively-valenced narratives evoked by perception of the verb “eating” (e.g., eating →fat →lonely), overriding any explicitly provided eating-pleasant valence information. In our study, we presented eating-related verbs under subliminal visual conditions to mitigate the onset of eating-associated deliberation. Verbs were linked with neutral or positively valenced terms across independent blocks. Modulations of event-related magnetoencephalographic (MEG) components and parietal activations in the alpha range (8–12 Hz) illustrated a significant effect of valence during pre-lexical time windows. We found significantly greater saliva production and declarations of increasing hunger after eating-related verbs were linked with positive terms. Orally reported preferences did not vary between conditions.

Research on the derived transformation of stimulus functions (ToF) typically employs single dependent measures for assessing the stimulus functions after derived relations have been established. For the first time, we examined ToF using three dependent measures both prior to and after relational training and testing. Specifically, we employed self-reports, implicit association tests, and frontal alpha asymmetry as pre versus post measures for assessing ToF. First, we trained two abstract shapes as contextual cues for happier-than and unhappier-than relations, respectively. Next, four conditional discriminations (A+/B-, B+/C-, C+/D-, and D+/E-) were trained in the presence of the happier-than cue only, where A, B, C, D, and E were blurred faces. This was followed by tests for contextually controlled transitive inference (TI) in the presence of both the happier-than and unhappier-than cues. For the participants who demonstrated TI, performance across all three measures following relational training and testing indicated that the Bhappiness^functions of the A/B stimuli were greater than those of the D/E stimuli. This constitutes the first known demonstration of emotional ToF along explicit, implicit, and neurophysiological measures concurrently. Keywords Transformation of functions . Frontal alpha asymmetry . Transitive inference . Symbolic relationsVarious organisms can infer a relation between a wide array of stimuli given a common, mediating stimulus, and in so doing demonstrate what has been called a Btransitive inference^ (TI;Vasconcelos, 2008). To illustrate TI in a human, imagine we provide a participant with the following statements-BAdam is happier than Bob,^BBob is happier than Carry,^BCarry is happier than Dan,^and BDan is happier than Eden.^If he or she were then asked to select the Bhappier^individual from between Bob and Dan, selecting Bob would be deemed a demonstration of TI, since to provide the correct answer required making an inference based on the common node (Carry) that Bob and Dan are both related to (i.e