November 22, 2014

November 22, 2014

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Behaviorist

Dear Reader, 

 

This writing is a response to “The Role Of Automatic Negative Reinforcement In Clinical Problems” (2005) by Raymond G. Miltenberger. The paper is easy to read and consequently easy to respond to. Miltenberger explains well why automatic negative reinforcement is difficult to treat and therefore understudied. Clinical problems like binge eating, hair pulling and compulsive buying, illustrate the problems involved in treating behaviors which are automatic negatively reinforced. 

While reading this paper, this author was immediately thinking about Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB), which is also maintained by automatic negative reinforcement. NVB is definitely a clinical problem, but it is until now not considered as such. NVB is the way in which we communicate most of the time. In other words, NVB is the interaction which continues and increases our problems.

Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB), by contrast, addresses and solves our problems. This may sound vague, but when we begin to look into the occurrence of these two crucially important and easily detectable response classes, it soon becomes clear that there is a great difference between the communication and relationship in which we speak at or with each other. In the former, we maintain NVB, in the latter, we maintain SVB. In NVB, the behavior of the verbalizer is problematic, because it is based on the covert attempt to get away from negative emotions. Although our overt verbal behavior is socially mediated, our covert verbal behavior is maintained by automatic reinforcement. Parity with the verbal community causes the automatic reinforcement of our private speech. 

If, as this author believes and insists, everybody is mainly involved in NVB and we are pushing each other around with our negative emotions from which we are trying escape, NVB private speech becomes over time maintained by automatic reinforcement rather than by social reinforcement, because  verbal behavior, over the cause of development, recedes from an overt to a covert level. Thus, overt NVB necessarily results in covert NVB, while only overt SVB can result in covert SVB. The great difference between covert NVB and covert SVB is that the former is always maintained by automatic negative reinforcement, but the latter is maintained by automatic positive reinforcement. Since behaviors which are maintained by automatic negative reinforcement are the most difficult to treat, it is no wonder why human interaction has remained a huge, but unaddressed problem. 

Aggressive behaviors which we often see in individuals with autism are functionally identical to NVB: people just don’t know how to communicate, that is, how to have SVB. There are no mysteries in the natural science of human behavior. As we pretend to explain such aggressive verbal behavior as innate, caused by stress hormones, having to do with the aggressor’s disposition, determined by his or her personality traits (such as need for achievement or power), we have not made any progress in terms of solving problems of relationship. We have not been very successful in decreasing and replacing communication problem behaviors. Our communication  problems have been around for so long that we are actually quite bored by them. Consequently, NVB is ubiquitous and SVB is rear. 

Individuals with autism also often manifest self-injurious behaviors, which are functionally the same as the less conspicuous ways in which people who are stuck in NVB keep hurting themselves. The reason that we don’t acknowledge food or drug addiction, domestic violence, abuse or unhealthy behavior, as having the same etiology is because we focus on topography of behavior, but not on its function. Once we look into the meaning of why we keep having NVB instead of SVB and why we keep making SVB more and more impossible, we find that there is always a pay-off. 

Although NVB behavior is complex behavior under control of multiple environmental variables, the different topographies involved in NVB have something in common. Whether someone has his or her head up his or her ass or his or her foot in his or her mouth, the reason why NVB keeps occurring is because people simply don’t know how to have SVB. Although our haphazard ways of asking, demanding, distracting or avoiding each other’s attention are mediated by different topographies, they still all come down to one and the same root cause, namely that we don’t know how to express our needs in such a way that they can be met. As the imminent behaviorists Edward Carr (1993) has said, it is not about our behavior, but about of what the behavior is a function. NVB is a caused by the fact that we, just like autistic individuals, don’t know how to communicate.

Presumably, the purpose of our verbal behavior is mainly instructional, but this meaning is only apparent to the extent that we succeed in getting our needs met. Since NVB is a coarse-grained, uni-directional behavior, it cannot represent our needs. Many of our subtle, bi-directional, social needs have remained virtually unaddressed or have been ignored. Only our fine-grained SVB can completely meet our needs, but this requires the crafty re-shaping of our coarse-grained NVB. The lack of reciprocity, which is so apparent in individuals with autism, is also blatantly common in NVB communicators, who are not diagnosed with autism, but who are equally troubled.