FAST EMOTIONAL FLEXIBILITY TRAINING

FAST Training for cognitive and Emotional Flexibilty

AVAILABLE ONLY TO CLINICIANS/PROFESSIONALS

FAST COGNITIVE BRAIN TRAINING

The FAST (Function Acquisition Speed Test) brain training tool is a newly developed training and testing programme designed to both measure the strength of associations between concepts, and to weaken the effect of those associations where they are emotionally problematic.

FAST has emerged from the Relational Frame Theory (RFT) research programme at Maynooth University and aligns with the approach of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) in helping people with “cognitive diffusion” (deliteralization) from threatening or painful words and to open then up emotionally to other possible ways of confronting painful concepts. The FAST works by providing practice at both confirming and disconfirming associations between sensitive words and images (e.g., spiders for a person afraid of spiders) and various other positive and negative concepts.

Across many sessions of practice, the user becomes more and more fluent and comfortable associating painful stimuli in various ways that loosen their often-rigid emotional responses to those words or images (or thoughts associated with them). Target scores assigned to the game, are designed to indicate to users when their responses to these potentially problematic concepts are at reasonably maximal flexibility. However, even after reaching these target scores, users are encouraged to continue practicing their “emotional flexibility” on relevant FAST games. The FAST has been developed across several published studies by Dr. Bryan Roche emerging from the Maynooth University RFT lab.

FAST Research Publications

The following publications represent a sample of papers that provide a background to the rationale of the FAST (Function Acquisition Speed Test) method.

  • Cummins, J., & Roche, B. (2020). Quantifying differential within-class stimulus relatedness using the Function Acquisition Speed Test. Behavioral Processes.
  • Tyndall, I., Curtis, A., Cummins, J., & Roche, B. (2019). The Function Acquisition Speed Test (FAST) as a measure of verbal stimulus relations in the context of condom use. The Psychological Record 69, 107-115.
  • Cummins, J., Roche, B., Tyndall, I., & Cartwright, A. (2018). The relationship between differential stimulus relatedness and implicit test effect sizes. Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior, 118, 24-38.
  • Cartwright, A., Roche, B., Gogarty, M., O’Reilly, A. & Stewart, I. (2016). Using a Modified Function Acquisition Speed Test (FAST) for Assessing Implicit Gender Stereotypes. The Psychological Record, 66, 223-233.
  • O’Reilly, A., Roche, B., Ruiz, M., Ryan, A., & Campion, G. (2013). A Function Acquisition Speed Test for equivalence relations (FASTER). The Psychological Record, 63, 707-724.
  • O'Reilly, A., Roche, B., Ruiz, M. R., Tyndall, I. & Gavin, A. (2012). The Function Acquisition Speed Test (FAST): A behavior-analytic implicit test for assessing stimulus relations. The Psychological Record, 62, 507–528.
  • Gavin, A., Roche, B., Ruiz, M. R. & Hogan, M., & O’Reilly, A, (2012). A behavior-analytically modified Implicit Association Test for measuring the sexual categorization of children. The Psychological Record, 62, 55-68.
  • Roche, B., & O’Reilly, A., Gavin, A., Ruiz, M. R. & Arancibia, G. (2012). Using behavior-analytic implicit tests to assess sexual interests among normal and sex-offender populations. Socioaffective Neuroscience and Psychology, 2, 17335 - DOI: 10.3402/snp.v2i0.17335