Barnes, D., & Roche, B. (1997). Relational frame theory and the experimental analysis of human sexuality. Applied and Preventive Psychology, 6, 117-135.
The authors ( researchers at U Coll Cork, Dept of Applied Psychology, Cork, Ireland) present how behavior analysts have not been particularly active in the experimental analysis of human sexual behavior. This may be because the complexity of human sexuality suggests that it defies a molecular empirical analysis. Recent developments in the experimental analysis of complex behavior and language, however, have opened the way for a modern behavior-analytic research program into human sexual conduct. The present article outlines the most important of these recent developments and illustrates how, at the Cork laboratory, advances in the study of arbitrarily applicable relational responding have been harnessed to form the basis of a modern behavior-analytic treatment of human sexuality.