April 13, 2014
Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Behaviorist
Dear Reader,
I have just woken up from a wonderful sleep. As I went into
the office, Kayla, our cat, walked with me and greeted me, by touching my legs.
When I sat down, she sat on my lap and began purring, while occasional turning
her pretty face to me. She squinted with her eyes and seemed perfectly in tune
with my good mood. I love our cat. Yesterday, as I was standing in the kitchen
and was talking with my wife Bonnie, Kayla was at the other side of the living
room. She saw me standing near the fridge and came running into the kitchen.
Then she jumped on the counter, on me and then on top of the fridge, where she
sat in her little bamboo basket. It was so funny that my wife and I were
laughing. Kayla likes to use us as a stepping stone to jump to higher places. However, this doesn’t always work out though. Not too long ago, I was in the office
standing near the book shelves. She wanted to jump on me and then onto the shelves. I didn’t want her to
knock over the pictures which are on the shelves, but she had already decided to jump on me and she
scratched my shoulders and that was very painful and annoying.
Today I will give another seminar. Bonnie and I had nice
work out this morning and we went to have lunch together afterwards. We ate
Chinese: spicy ribs and chow fung and took home the left overs in a little box.
It tasted delicious. Today I will experiment with Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB)
in a way that I haven’t done before. I will still describe SVB and Noxious Verbal
Behavior (NVB), but then, as a discriminative stimulus, I will hold up my left hand or my right hand to
indicate that we are having SVB or NVB. This nonverbal signal is hypothesized
to avoid lengthy explanations and get everybody aboard a bit quicker. Also, I will
let others raise their left or right hand so that we all begin to discern it
from each other. This new form of discrimination learning seems more pragmatic
to me than using verbal explanations to refer to the nonverbal.
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