Dermot Barnes-Holmes

Introduction

Dermot Barnes-Holmes (born 1963) is Professor of Psychology at Ulster University in Northern Ireland. He is the leading figure, alongside Steven C. Hayes, in the development of Relational Frame Theory — a behaviour-analytic account of human language and cognition that has become the most influential and the most contested development in behaviour analysis since B. F. Skinner's Verbal Behavior.

RFT proposes that the distinctive feature of human language is not association but relating: once a person has learned to relate stimuli arbitrarily, in ways not dictated by their physical properties, that relational repertoire can be extended indefinitely to new stimuli without further training. The theory was built to solve a problem Skinner never solved — how a behaviourist framework can account for the generativity of language — and it has been used to underwrite a large applied literature, most prominently Acceptance and Commitment Therapy.

Barnes-Holmes also designed the Implicit Relational Assessment Procedure, an implicit measure built on RFT principles rather than on simple association, and he was ranked the most prolific author in the world in the experimental analysis of human behaviour for the period 1980 to 1999.

Early Life and Education

Barnes-Holmes studied at the University of Ulster at Coleraine, taking a BSc with honours in psychology between 1982 and 1985. He then spent a year in London at Garnett College, later merged with Greenwich University, taking a certificate in further and adult education, before returning to Coleraine for doctoral study.

He completed his DPhil in psychology in 1990 under the supervision of Julian Leslie. The late 1980s were the period in which the experimental analysis of human behaviour was beginning to grapple seriously with stimulus equivalence, and the derivation of untrained relations among stimuli became the technical core of his subsequent work.

Academic and Professional Career

His first academic post was at University College Cork, where he held a temporary lectureship from 1990, a tenured college lectureship from 1991, and a statutory senior lectureship from 1997. There he founded and led the Behaviour Analysis and Cognitive Science research unit.

In 1999 he moved to the National University of Ireland, Maynooth — later Maynooth University — as foundation professor of psychology and the department's first head, a post he held until 2008 while continuing as professor until 2015.

In 2014 he was awarded an Odysseus Group I grant by the Flanders Research Foundation, a scheme aimed at researchers judged to be international pioneers in their field; he was the sole Group I recipient that year. The award, worth roughly two million euro, funded a permanent senior professorship at Ghent University and a research programme titled Toward a Relational Frame Theory Account of Human Psychopathology within a Functional-Cognitive Framework. He held the Ghent post from 2015 to 2020.

In 2020 he returned to his alma mater as a full professor at Ulster University, where he is also course director for the Masters by Research programme.

His honours include the Don Hake Translational Research Award from the American Psychological Association in 2012, which he was the first researcher based outside the United States to receive, and the Quad-L Annual Lecture Award from the University of New Mexico in 2015, of which he was the twenty-sixth recipient. He is a past president and fellow of the Association for Contextual Behavioral Science and a fellow of the Association for Behavior Analysis International. He has supervised more than forty doctoral students since 1993, has served on the editorial boards of essentially every major journal in behaviour analysis, and by 2023 his work had accumulated more than 29,000 citations and an h-index of 90.

Major Contributions to Psychology

Relational Frame Theory

RFT starts from a distinction Skinner did not make: between relating stimuli on the basis of their physical properties and relating them arbitrarily, on the basis of social convention. A child can learn that a larger object is "more than" a smaller one by generalising from physical experience. But learning that the word more applies regardless of what is being compared, and that if A is more than B and B is more than C then A is more than C, requires arbitrarily applicable relational responding.

Once that repertoire is in place, several consequences follow. Relations are mutually entailed: if A is opposite to B, then B is opposite to A, without training. They combine: relations among A, B, and C yield derived relations between A and C. And crucially, stimulus functions transform: if B is established as a reinforcer and A is derived as more than B, A may become more reinforcing than B without further conditioning.

The theory identifies a family of relational frames — coordination, distinction, opposition, comparison, hierarchy, deixis, temporality, causality — each governed by contextual cues that specify what kind of relation is operating. Human language, on this account, is relational responding under contextual control, and the pathological cases are cases where the relational network becomes rigid.

The 2001 volume and the research programme

The book that gave the theory its canonical form is Relational Frame Theory: A Post-Skinnerian Account of Human Language and Cognition, edited by Hayes, Barnes-Holmes, and Bryan Roche in 2001. Barnes-Holmes co-authored twelve of its thirteen chapters. It has been cited more than four thousand times, and it is the text that supporters and critics alike treat as the statement of the position.

The Implicit Relational Assessment Procedure

Barnes-Holmes conceived and programmed the IRAP, a computer-based measure in which participants respond to stimulus relations under time pressure. Its design differs from that of the Implicit Association Test in that it measures specific relations — same, opposite, more than — rather than overall association strength, which makes it possible to ask questions the IAT cannot. It has been applied to attitudes, self-concept, clinical populations, and the assessment of sexual offenders, and it has generated a substantial methodological literature of its own.

Applications: ACT, autism, and psychopathology

RFT's principal applied extension is Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, developed by Hayes. Barnes-Holmes has contributed to the basic science that underwrites it, particularly the analysis of deictic relational frames — I and you, here and there, now and then — which RFT treats as the foundation of perspective-taking. Training in deictic frames has been shown to improve performance on theory-of-mind tasks in children with autism, with transfer to materials different from those used in training.

Major Publications

Hayes, S. C., Barnes-Holmes, D., & Roche, B. (Eds.) (2001). Relational Frame Theory: A Post-Skinnerian Account of Human Language and Cognition. Plenum Press.
Barnes-Holmes, D., Barnes-Holmes, Y., & Cullinan, V. (2000). Relational frame theory and Skinner's Verbal Behavior: A possible synthesis. The Behavior Analyst, 23, 69-84.
Barnes-Holmes, D., Luciano, C., & Barnes-Holmes, Y. (2004). Relational frame theory: Definitions, controversies, and applications (special issue, parts I and II). International Journal of Psychology and Psychological Therapy, 4, 177–394, 443–622.
Barnes-Holmes, D., & Harte, C. (2022). Relational frame theory 20 years on: The Odysseus voyage and beyond. Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior, 117(2), 240–266.
Barnes-Holmes, D., Barnes-Holmes, Y., & McEnteggart, C. (2020). Updating RFT (more field than frame) and its implications for process-based therapy. The Psychological Record, 70, 605–624.

Impact and Legacy

RFT changed what behaviour analysts talk about. Before it, the experimental analysis of human behaviour was largely confined to stimulus equivalence and to extensions of animal learning principles, and there was no credible behaviour-analytic research programme on language. After it, there is one, with its own journals, conferences, and clinical applications. Barnes-Holmes's role was to provide much of the experimental apparatus and a large share of the empirical output, and the productivity measure — most prolific author in the field for two decades — is one indication of how much of the programme he personally carried.

The criticisms, however, are unusually pointed, and they come mostly from within behaviour analysis rather than from outside it. RFT has become one of the most hotly contested topics in the field.

The most substantive objection is that the theory does not state its principle. In a much-cited 2004 review in the Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior, David Palmer noted that the 2001 volume promises a new principle of behaviour but never delivers one: critical features of the principle are not specified, and in the absence of an explicit principle the theory is difficult to evaluate. Palmer argued that counter-examples suggest a role for mediating behaviour, possibly covert, which raises the question of whether a new principle is needed at all, and he defended Skinner's definition of verbal behaviour against the RFT attempt to replace it.

A second objection is about the empirical base. William McIlvane, reviewing the same volume, argued that RFT must first be reconciled with the basic behavioural processes that are the core of the experimental analysis of behaviour, and that its research programme relies far too heavily on college students and verbal school-aged children. Until it is supplemented by intensive study of populations with developmental limitations — notably typically developing children at the moment they are acquiring language — McIlvane wrote, RFT "will remain a plausible account that merely competes with other plausible accounts without promoting ultimate resolution of the critical issues."

A third objection concerns testability. RFT's core constructs, transformation of stimulus functions chief among them, are defined at a level of abstraction that makes disconfirmation difficult. When a theory can accommodate nearly every outcome in its domain, accommodating them is not evidence for it. Supporters point to the experimental literature on derived relational responding, which does generate testable predictions, and to the randomised controlled trial literature on ACT as downstream validation — but that defence concedes the point that the clinical evidence does not directly test the theoretical mechanism. ACT may work for reasons RFT does not predict.

A fourth is about novelty and vocabulary. "Arbitrarily applicable relational responding" describes what other frameworks call symbolic reasoning, and some cognitive scientists argue that the phenomena RFT catalogues are handled adequately by existing models of mental representation without the commitment to a behaviourist ontology that RFT insists on. Whether that methodological commitment is discipline or straitjacket depends largely on the reader's priors.

A fifth, narrower concern attaches to the IRAP. As an implicit measure it inherits the psychometric difficulties that affect implicit measures generally — modest internal consistency and test–retest reliability, and predictive validity that varies substantially across domains. The measure is more specific than the IAT, which is a genuine advantage, but specificity does not by itself solve reliability. Barnes-Holmes has been unusually blunt about this himself: a paper co-authored with Colin Harte in Perspectives on Behavior Science is titled The IRAP as a measure of implicit cognition: A case of Frankenstein's monster, and it treats the instrument's problems as serious enough to warrant reconstruction rather than defence.

What none of these objections disputes is the size of the achievement. A framework that was marginal in 1985 now anchors a clinical tradition, a research society, and a substantial share of contemporary behaviour-analytic work on human language, and Barnes-Holmes is the person most responsible for giving it an empirical body.

Learn More

Related figures in this library: Steven C. Hayes, co-developer of Relational Frame Theory, and B. F. Skinner, whose analysis of verbal behaviour RFT was written to extend.

References

Hayes, S. C., Strosahl, K. D., & Wilson, K. G. (1999). Acceptance and commitment therapy: An experiential approach to behavior change. Guilford Press.
Barnes-Holmes, D., Barnes-Holmes, Y., & Cullinan, V. (2000). Relational frame theory and Skinner's Verbal Behavior: A possible synthesis. The Behavior Analyst, 23, 69-84.
Hayes, S. C., Barnes-Holmes, D., & Roche, B. (Eds.). (2001). Relational frame theory: A post-Skinnerian account of human language and cognition. Kluwer Academic/Plenum.
McIlvane, W. J. (2003). A stimulus in need of a response. The Analysis of Verbal Behavior, 19, 29-37.
Palmer, D. C. (2004). Data in search of a principle: A review of Relational Frame Theory: A Post-Skinnerian Account of Human Language and Cognition. Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior, 81(2), 189-204.
Barnes-Holmes, D., Barnes-Holmes, Y., & McEnteggart, C. (2020). Updating RFT (more field than frame) and its implications for process-based therapy. The Psychological Record, 70, 605-624.
Barnes-Holmes, D., & Harte, C. (2022). Relational frame theory 20 years on: The Odysseus voyage and beyond. Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior, 117(2), 240-266.