Relational Frame Theory: A Post-Skinnerian Account of Human Language and Cognition

Rating:
Summary: Excellent psychological science
Review: Psychologists who think behaviorism has little or nothing to offer to a scientific account of cognition and emotion should read this book. Through coherent, conceptually pure theory and consistent empirical research, Hayes and colleagues have developed an account of these pivotal topics that may bring behaviorism back onto the main stage in psychology. Relational Frame Theory (RFT) makes a small handful of parsimonious additions to traditional Skinnerian radical behaviorism that appear to account for an impressively broad variety of clinical, social, and educational phenomena. RFT builds on the traditional strengths of behaviorism by bringing a small, core set of directly observable principles to bear on broad-ranging topics like language, cognition, and emotion. While Skinner's (1957) account of verbal behavior arguably minimized the importance of cognition and emotion, RFT recognizes their pivotal importance and points the way toward some novel and clever psychological interventions (most notably, Hayes Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, which is firmly grounded in RFT principles). In the process, RFT avoids the tenuous inferences and mechanism-postulating pitfalls of (for example) cognitive and psychodynamic theory, and avoids the scientific progress-retarding inconsistencies of theoretically eclectic approaches like cognitive-behaviorism. The biggest question that remains for the viability of an RFT approach to language, cognition, and emotion is: Is there predictive and influential utility in the approach? That is, does thinking about psychological and educational issues from an RFT perspective result in increasingly effective interventions? The answer to this question should unfold, empirically, over the next decade or two. This book is not for the casual reader-while RFT is at heart an elegantly simple set of principles, it is initially difficult to get one's head around the concept. But for psychologists & other social scientists with an abiding interest in solid scientific accounts of language, cognition, and emotion, this book is well worth the read. Coherent conceptual accounts based on good empirical data, like RFT, are very few and far between in psychology-and, collectively, are the best argument for psychology being classifiable as a science I have seen.