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The Socratic debate has traditionally been described as a procedure through which the therapist attempts to change the irrational beliefs of their client through questioning and dialogue. From an analytical-functional research perspective, it has been defined as a verbal shaping procedure in which the therapist differentially reinforces protherapeutic utterances. The objective of the present study was to analyze the relationship between the discriminative stimuli emitted by the therapist with and without prompts and the responses emitted by the client based on their approach to the therapeutic goal. Sixty debate recordings from 18 cases, which were classified according to their level of effectiveness, were analyzed. The analyses showed no statistically significant differences in the rate per minute of each type of discriminative stimulus according to the level of debate effectiveness. There was also a strong association of the discriminative category with response options and of discriminative with the description of contingencies with the verbalizations approaching the therapeutic goal. It is concluded that some prompts to the discriminative stimulus may make it more likely to evoke target responses, and thus, clients may more efficiently access the verbal reinforcers presented by therapists, facilitating the verbal shaping procedure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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