Private Events: Naming the Feelings Only You Can Sense

A private event is a feeling or body signal that only one person can notice. A racing heart, a tight stomach, or a sense of worry all count. Nobody else can see these things happen inside a body. But they still shape how a person acts.

This matters because so much of behavior work depends on what we can see. Private events push past that limit. When a learner can name what they feel inside, they can ask for help, stay safe, and tell us what is wrong. This page pulls together what several experts teach about private events and why the skill is worth building.

Private events are still behavior#

A radical behaviorist studies behavior using the environment, not hidden mental causes. From this view, private events are not off-limits to science. They are just quiet behaviors we cannot watch from the outside. The same things that shape public actions also shape these inner ones.

Carolyn makes this point clearly in her talk on internal warning signs.

From a radical behaviorist perspective, private events are not outside the science of behavior. They are covert behaviors subject to the same environmental influences as our overt behavior. From the talk. Carolyn

So a private event is real behavior. We just study it in a different way.

We read them through public signs#

Since we cannot see inside a body, we watch for outside clues. Carolyn calls these public accompaniments. A learner might rub their stomach, breathe fast, or pull away. These signs tend to show up next to the inner change. They give us a starting point.

Carolyn is honest about the hard part here. She notes that we cannot directly observe a child's heart rate climbing or their stomach tightening. So we rely on the responses that ride along with those hidden shifts. This is how a therapist begins to guess what a learner may be feeling.

These outside clues are not perfect. Two learners may show the same feeling in very different ways. One might go quiet, and another might get loud. So we watch each person closely over time. We learn their own signals and pair them with the right words. That patient work is what makes the guessing more reliable.

Feelings often come before words#

Sometimes a learner senses that something is off before they can say why. Carolyn Broner works on relationship safety, and she frames this gap as a core problem. A child may show small warning behaviors that point to a private event they cannot yet put into words.

Her fix is to give kids plain language for inner states. Instead of only teaching rules, she teaches phrases like "something feels different." That phrase becomes a tool. It lets a child flag a feeling before it has a clear name, and long before they could call it "unsafe."

emotional safety language gives children more than rules. It gives them language for what they are experiencing. In other words, private events. From the talk. Carolyn Broner

Naming feelings is a form of tact#

In behavior work, a tact is a label for something a person senses. You see a dog, you say "dog." That is a tact. Dana Pettus describes the simplest version as a pure tact. A cue triggers a label, and the label earns a general reward like praise or attention.

Private events fit this frame in a special way. The cue is inside the body, not out in the room. When a learner says "I feel scared," they are tacting a private event. The signal that sets off the label is one only they can feel. That makes the skill harder to teach, but the shape of it is the same.

The skill lets learners advocate#

Why push so hard on this? Mark Malady, a BCBA (a board certified behavior analyst), ties it to self-advocacy. He calls the mand-tact repertoire vital. A mand is a request or an ask. A tact is a label. Put them together and a learner can name a state and ask for what they need. In his talk, Malady says this paired skill set is vital because it teaches a person to advocate for their own accommodations.

Malady stresses that this skill can start early. A learner does not need a big or fancy set of words. The skill can use any medium too, such as speech, signs, or a device. What matters is that the person can flag a need from the very start.

Small skills stack into safety#

Look across these talks and a pattern shows up. Each expert starts with one small piece. Carolyn watches for outside signs. Broner hands kids simple safety words. Pettus builds the label itself. Malady links the label to a request.

None of these steps is huge on its own. Together they let a learner move from a vague inner feeling to a clear, useful message. That message can keep them safe, get them help, or end a bad moment. Private events sit at the base of all of it.

What the research says#

Studies back up the idea that these inner labels can be taught. One study used prompts and error correction to teach three children with autism to tact the private events of others (Belisle et al., 2019). The children read outside cues, like a bandage meaning "hurt," and learned fast.

Another team taught children with autism to tact body sensations from touch, such as "prickly" from a hairbrush (Rajagopal et al., 2021). Learners applied the labels to new objects. But the labels did not carry over to brand-new sensations. This shows both the promise and the limits of the work.

A third study trained teens with autism to spot the private events of others using video scenes (Schmick et al., 2018). Relational training is a method that teaches learners to link related ideas. It helped most of them keep the skill with new and related examples. Other work goes further. It argues that hidden body signals can act as real cues that shape both public and private behavior (Meindl & Ivy, 2023).

Taken together, these studies send one message. Inner states are not out of reach. With careful teaching, learners can name feelings in themselves and in others. The work builds on conditional discrimination, the skill of picking the right response based on context. You can explore it in Teaching WH-Questions Isn't Enough: Building True Conditional Discrimination.

Frequently asked questions#

What is a private event in ABA?

In ABA, short for applied behavior analysis, a private event is any behavior only one person can notice. It includes feelings, thoughts, and body signals like a racing heart. Others cannot see it happen. But it still counts as behavior and can be studied and taught.

How do you teach someone to tact a private event?

Most methods start with public signs that ride along with the inner state. A teacher pairs an outside cue with a plain label, then rewards correct naming. Over time the learner links their own inner signal to the right word.

Why do private events matter for safety?

When a learner can name a feeling, they can act on it. They can ask for help, leave a place, or tell an adult something feels wrong. Teaching relationship safety, like in It's Complicated: Teaching Relationship Safety That Reflects Real Life, builds directly on this skill. The label comes first, then the safe action follows.