Arbitrary Applicable Relational Responding and Derived Relational Responding: What They Are and Why They Matter Clinically

A Functional Contextual and RFT Primer for Practitioners

By Todd Schmenk, M.S., M.Ed., LMHC

Why This Distinction Matters Before We Define Anything

If you have ever watched a client spiral from a single worried thought into a cascade of dread within seconds, you have watched relational framing in action.

If you have ever noticed that a word — "failure," "obligation," "unlovable" — carries far more behavioral weight than its dictionary definition would suggest, you have witnessed the arbitrary applicability of relational frames.

These are not poetic observations. They describe specific, learnable processes that have direct implications for how suffering is constructed and how clinical intervention can be targeted.

Relational Frame Theory provides the account. Two of its most important concepts are derived relational responding (DRR) and arbitrarily applicable relational responding, often abbreviated as AARR. They are related but distinct and understanding the difference sharpens both conceptualization and treatment.

The Starting Point:

Humans Relate Stimuli to One Another

All organisms learn. Through direct experience, a tone paired with a shock produces fear in the presence of the tone. This is stimulus-response learning, and it is well understood across species.

What humans do that other species do not do, or do only in very limited ways, is relate stimuli to one another in the absence of direct training, and do so in ways that transform how those stimuli function.

This capacity is not trivial. It is the foundation of language, cognition, and the vast majority of human psychological suffering. It is also the foundation of meaning, values, and the ability to imagine a future worth moving toward. The same process produces both the problem and the possibility.

Derived Relational Responding:

Relations That Emerge Without Direct Training

Derived relational responding refers to the emergence of stimulus relations that have not been directly reinforced. The word "derived" is doing important work here. These relations are not taught explicitly. They arise from the relational frame that has been established.

A simple example makes this concrete. Suppose a child learns through direct training that the word "cat" refers to a particular animal. She is also taught that "gato" is the Spanish word for the same animal. She has been trained in one direction: cat = gato. From that single training, she can derive the reverse: gato = cat. She can also derive that gato refers to the animal itself, even though that relation was never directly trained. Three relations emerge from one.

This is combinatorial entailment, the defining feature of derived relational responding. Relations combine and generate new relations that go beyond what direct experience has established and the behavioral implications are significant.

A client does not need to have experienced catastrophic illness to respond to a doctor's raised eyebrow as though catastrophe were imminent. The relational network does the work. Derived relations fill in what direct experience has not provided.

Clinically, this explains the speed and breadth of psychological distress. A single triggering stimulus — a tone of voice, a dental appointment, a cluttered apartment — contacts a relational network that may have been built over years. The functions of distress, threat, inadequacy, or obligation transfer through that network instantly and automatically.

The client is not being irrational.

They are doing exactly what a language-capable organism does.

Arbitrarily Applicable Relational Responding: When Physical Properties Are Irrelevant

AARR describes something more specific: the human capacity to apply relational frames to any stimuli whatsoever, based on contextual cues rather than the physical properties of the stimuli themselves.

In non-arbitrary relational responding, the relation is grounded in physical reality. A rock is heavier than a feather. That relation holds because of something real and measurable about the stimuli. The relation is not arbitrary — it is physically constrained.

In arbitrarily applicable relational responding, the relation holds because a social and verbal community has established that it holds, not because of anything intrinsic to the stimuli.

The word "danger" does not look dangerous. It shares no physical properties with the experiences it signals. The name "worthless" applied to a person does not reflect anything measurable about that person. Yet both function powerfully because they are embedded in relational networks where those frames have been applied and reinforced over time.

The word "arbitrary" here does not mean random or meaningless. It means the relation is established by context — by a history of verbal and social reinforcement — rather than by the physical features of the things being related. This is precisely what makes human language so flexible and so pervasive in its influence.

Any stimulus can be placed in relation to any other stimulus.

A person can be framed as equivalent to a failure. A feeling can be framed as evidence of weakness. A bodily sensation can be framed as a sign of impending catastrophe. None of these relations are physically constrained. All of them carry genuine behavioral consequences.

The Relationship Between the Two Concepts

Derived relational responding and AARR are not competing explanations. They describe different aspects of the same underlying capacity.

Derived relational responding describes the process: relations emerge without direct training through combinatorial entailment and mutual entailment. If A relates to B in a particular way, and B relates to C, relations between A and C can be derived without those being explicitly trained. (and often are, even when they are in fact, not related at all.)

AARR describes the mechanism that makes this process so pervasive in humans: relational frames can be applied to any stimuli because the cues that control relational responding are contextual rather than physical. The frame of equivalence, comparison, opposition, temporality, causality, hierarchy — these can be applied anywhere, to anything, because they are governed by verbal context, not stimulus properties.

Put simply: AARR is why humans can relate anything to anything. Derived relational responding is what happens when those relations generate new relations that were never directly trained. Both are necessary to account for the complexity of human cognition and the reach of language into every domain of psychological life.

Transformation of Stimulus Functions:

Where This Becomes Clinical

Neither concept would carry much clinical weight without a third process: transformation of stimulus functions. This is the mechanism by which the psychological functions of one stimulus transfer to another through their relational connection.

If a client has learned, through direct experience, that disappointment from caregivers signals rejection and loss, and if the word "no" has been framed as equivalent to causing that disappointment, then the act of saying no to anyone — regardless of context — may carry the psychological functions of rejection and loss. The client does not experience this as a logical chain. They experience it as dread, guilt, or paralysis. The functions have transferred through the relational network, automatically and often outside of awareness.

This is why the clinical problem is rarely the surface behavior. A client who cannot say no is not simply lacking assertiveness skills. A client who catastrophizes a medical symptom is not simply engaging in faulty cognition. In both cases, a relational network is transforming the function of present events through derived and arbitrarily applied relations built across a learning history. The network is the unit of analysis, not the thought, the feeling, or the behavior in isolation.

Clinical Implications:

What This Changes About Assessment

Understanding AARR and derived relational responding changes how a clinician listens.

When a client uses language — any language — the clinician is not only gathering descriptive information. They are observing a relational network in action. The words a client uses to describe themselves, their problems, and their possibilities are not neutral containers for meaning. They are stimuli embedded in networks of derived relations, each carrying transformed functions from years of verbal and social learning.

Assessment from this perspective asks:

• What relational frames appear to be governing this client's behavior right now?

• What functions have transferred through those frames, and from where?

• What contextual cues are evoking particular frames in particular situations?

• Where is the network rigid — applying the same frame regardless of context — and where is there flexibility?

This is not a checklist. It is a way of listening that keeps function in view rather than getting pulled into the content of what is being said.

Clinical Implications:

What This Changes About Intervention

If derived relations and AARR explain how language constructs psychological suffering, they also point toward how intervention works.

Defusion, as an ACT process, is not about changing the content of thoughts. It is about altering the context in which relational frames operate, so that their functions are transformed without the underlying network needing to be dismantled.

When a client can observe the thought "I am a failure" as a verbal event — a collection of words with a history — rather than experiencing it as a transparent description of reality, the behavioral function of that thought changes. The derived relations remain. The automatic behavioral control weakens.

Metaphor and language-based interventions work through the same mechanism. When a therapist introduces a new frame — anxiety as a dashboard warning light rather than a signal of danger, obligation as something chosen rather than owed — they are not replacing one thought with another. They are introducing a new relational context that competes with and can gradually alter the functions that have been transferred through the existing network.

This is also why behavioral commitments matter. Direct experience establishes new contingencies that can over time alter the functions that derived relations have established (think variation selection, retention). When a client allows guilt to be present while choosing how to spend her time, and discovers that the predicted catastrophe does not arrive, the derived relation between guilt and mandatory compliance begins to loosen. Not because she has been persuaded otherwise, but because the context has changed and new relations have been established.

A Practical Summary for Practitioners

These concepts can feel abstract on paper and immediately recognizable in session. A few anchoring points help bridge that gap.

Derived relational responding is visible whenever a client responds to a stimulus with an intensity or breadth that goes far beyond what direct experience would predict. The dental appointment that activates thoughts of aging, loss of control, financial ruin, and mortality is not a client being dramatic. It is a client with a richly connected relational network in which one stimulus contacts many others through derived relations.

AARR is visible whenever language carries weight that its literal content cannot explain. The word "selfish" applied to a single act of self-care can produce shame, behavioral withdrawal, and self-punishment — not because the act was harmful, but because the word has been applied within a relational frame that connects selfishness to rejection, moral failure, and loss of belonging.

The physical properties of the act are irrelevant.

The arbitrarily applied frame does all of the work.

Together, these processes explain why humans suffer so much through language and why language-based intervention — used with functional precision — is also among the most powerful tools available for change.

Closing Thought

RFT is sometimes described as dense or inaccessible and the terminology can make it feel that way. The concepts themselves, however, describe something every clinician has already observed.

Clients are not troubled by reality alone. They are troubled by the vast, interconnected, historically constructed network of relations that language has built around reality — relations that derive new meanings, apply arbitrarily to any stimulus, and transform the function of experience in ways that persist long after the original context has passed.

Knowing this does not make the work simpler. It makes it more precise and precision, in context, over time, is what workable clinical practice is built on.