| Summary: | The aim of this paper is to introduce behavioral pharmacology, emphasizing it as an area that shows the relevance of the complementarity between behavior analysis and physiology. Initially, the text presents a brief history of the subject and explores its fundamental precept – the assertion that the effects of a drug are environmental variables that exert different stimulus functions in respondent and operant contingencies. Afterwards, some experiments which investigated the behavioral mechanisms of drug action are briefly described. Finally, the paper points out that the investigation on drug-behavior relations carried out by behavioral pharmacology is consistent with the philosophical assumptions of radical behaviorism and with the conceptual and empirical basis of behavior analysis.
Keywords: behavioral pharmacology; behavior analysis; drugs.
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