Verbal regulation of behavior: A review from the Behavior theory of Ribes and López (1985)

Abstract

This paper critically examines the concept of verbal regulation of behavior based on the seminal work Theory of Behavior by Ribes and López (1985), in order to illustrate its usefulness as a conceptual framework for addressing psychological phenomena. This work constituted the first formal effort to recognize different types of functional organization of behavior beyond the verbal–nonverbal dichotomy. Consequently, it made it possible to outline an alternative interpretation of the research area known as say–do–say correspondence and to design an empirical strategy to test it. It is argued that research on say–do–say correspondence has implicitly adopted a series of conceptual misunderstandings regarding verbal regulation as conceived within the early twentieth-century Soviet materialist tradition. In the alternative conception derived from the Theory of Behavior, say–do–say correspondence is understood as a case of functional dominance. Although this concept does not appear explicitly in the work of Ribes and López (1985), functional salience highlights the fact that, in the organization of organism–environment interdependencies, certain elements play a decisive role in structuring a particular qualitative form of behavior.