November 11, 2014

November 11, 2014

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Behaviorist

Dear Reader, 

 

This author discovers something new about Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB) and Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB) every day. Today he read about automatic reinforcement. When behavior is automatically reinforced this is because the response and the reinforcer are the same. This fits with SVB in which a speaker listens to him or herself while he or she speaks. In SVB, we consider the discriminative effects of the verbalizer on the mediator, within one person. Each time we stimulate others with our speech, we also simultaneously stimulate ourselves, verbally as well as nonverbally. This becomes more apparent to when we deliberately listen to ourselves while we speak.

Oddly, it is only during SVB that we begin to capitalize on the auditory feedback that is a byproduct of our own speech. Only during SVB, which means very seldom, do we speak about the verbal and the nonverbal effects of self-listening. Stated differently, NVB reigns everywhere because seemingly harmless agential explanations, such as self-listening, keep dominating our spoken and written conversations – even in scientific circles. Because of pre-scientific language, which this author defines as NVB, we hardly ever talk about what we should be talking about. 

It isn’t hard to image that the verbal stimuli, which we as adults express in our interactions every day, are conditioned reinforcers and automatically reinforcing. When we as children produced the correct sounds in the presence of particular objects or events, these sounds, which we call words, became linked with various unconditioned reinforcers. When children learn how to speak and begin to produce the same sounds as their parents, these sounds, depending on what is reinforced and punished, become classically conditioned stimuli, which elicit strong emotional responses in them. This is why a person’s mother tongue produces reinforcing consequences and it also explains why and how SVB and NVB work. 

This author insists that sounds, more than words, are automatically reinforcing. Based on what he has observed in his seminars about SVB, he is convinced that the reinforcing effects of nonverbal stimuli are much more profound than those which are created by verbal stimuli. As the low rates of SVB  indicate, it is unusual to make this distinction while we speak. When we look into what causes automatic reinforcement, we find that we overestimate the verbal and underestimate the importance of the nonverbal.

Automatic reinforcement is believed to play a big role in the maintenance of self-stimulatory behavior in autism. Behavioral analysts try to replace behaviors, such as hand flapping or body rocking, with appropriate behaviors. Such operant behaviors are difficult to change because they are maintained automatically, respondently, by the reinforcing sensory stimuli they produce. In other words, when behaviors and reinforcers are the same, they aren’t mediated by social consequences and are resistant to it. Children with autism also have problems attending to simultaneous multiple cues. Their inability to discriminate relevant environmental cues from nonessential ones can be explained by the SVB/NVB distinction. 

This author questions why automatic reinforcement, which seems to be part of many of our behaviors, has received little attention? If it is mentioned at all, it is only mentioned in relation to behaviors that are hard to get rid of, because presumably they are not maintained by social reinforcement. Although self-stimulatory behavior as seen in autism is believed to be maintained by automatic reinforcement, Cunningham & Schreibman (2008) believe that a functional account provides a more realistic picture. If self-stimulatory behavior increases as a function of increased task demands, but decrease upon removal of aversive stimuli, aren’t self-stimulatory behaviors then socially mediated? When self-stimulatory behaviors increase in the time out condition, indicating that they were maintained by escape from task demands; when children who learned to say “help me” in the functional communication training decreased self-stimulatory behaviors; when light demand and acquisition of an alternative, more appropriate method of communicating frustration lead to decrease of self-stimulatory behavior; and, when the presence of a familiar person resulted in decrease in self-stimulating behavior, this is empirical evidence that external  and not internal stimuli are at work.

It can be stated unequivocally that NVB maintains self-stimulatory behavior, while SVB decreases it. In NVB, aversive nonverbal, presumably nonessential, cues distract from relevant, verbal cues, but in SVB we achieve behavioral change by identifying the environmental social variables of which the autistic's self-stimulating behaviors are a function. Self-stimulatory behavior is based on automatic reinforcement, but is also mediated by social variables. It can be easily verified that only in the presence of certain people will self-stimulatory behaviorl be increased or decreased. If in the presence of person A self-stimulatory behaviors are increased, but in the presence of person B self-stimulatory behaviors are decreased, we find that person A has a different tone of voice than person B. The sound of person A's voice has a different effect on the autistic than the sound of person B's voice. Moreover, if person A's voice is instructed to sound like person B, person A will start having a similar effect on the autistic as person B. Much progress has been prevented, because the effect of the sound of the speaker's voice has not yet been scientifically explored.