February 7, 2015

February 7, 2015 

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Behavioral Engineer

Dear Reader, 

 

This writer insists on context. This fifth response extends what is described in “Listening is Behaving Verbally” (2008) by H.D. Schlinger. As long as behaviorists don’t analyze the elephant in the room, that what we say is a function of emotions of how we say it, their writings will have a de-contextualizing effect. For pragmatic reasons, we need to be able to tact and differentiate the communication of our positive and our negative emotions. Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB) and Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB) are not theoretical constructs; they are two response classes every human being experiences, every day. 

It has become clear to this writer, while working with thousands people, that our fixation on the verbal, on what we say, stops us from paying attention to the nonverbal, to how we sound, to how we feel while we speak. Like other behaviorists and behaviorologist, who are trying to account for verbal behavior, Schlinger’s writing gets redundant due to his verbal fixation. Although he describes “forms of listening”, as “echoic”, “joint control” and “intraverbal” and acknowledges that “echoic responses may function as Sd for intraverbal responses that can both condition new verbal behavior” and “evoke other intraverbal responses either about what the speaker is saying or that have nothing to do with what the speaker is saying” (italics added), the distinction between what we say and how we say it plays only a minor role in his analysis. However, he emphasizes that when the listener’s intraverbal responses have nothing to do with what the speaker is saying, then “listening to the speaker ceases (we are said not to be paying attention anymore) leaving us to be our own speaker and listener.” Why this may occur, is left unanswered. 

Listeners are less likely to listen to speakers who are not listening to themselves. When speakers are listening to themselves, they are easier to listen to and learn from. Speakers who listen to themselves evoke in the listener the same phenomenon, they invite the listener to be a speaker who listens to him or herself too. Moreover, SVB is the conversation in which speakers and listeners switch back and forth between being a speaker and a listener. In NVB there is no such turn-taking. 

In NVB, listeners hardly speak and speakers hardly listen. Speakers with more SVB repertoire are always turned off by speakers with less SVB repertoire as speakers with less SVB repertoire always have more NVB repertoire. Speakers with more SVB repertoire are always turned off by speakers with more NVB repertoire. And, the same is true for listeners. 

Listeners with more SVB repertoire are turned off by speakers with more NVB repertoire and are even disturbed by other listeners who have more NVB repertoire. However, the opposite is not true: NVB speakers are not the least troubled by SVB listeners and are not at all influenced by SVB speakers. Most likely, NVB speakers turn SVB listeners into NVB listeners. SVB listeners are good at pretending to be listening, because they don’t want to get in trouble. Moreover, NVB speakers most likely turn SVB speakers into NVB speakers. Stated differently, we are much more easily influenced by negative than by positive emotions in our interactions with others. 

What Schlinger fails to mention is that the listener’s self-talk, which is a function of being turned off by the speaker's sound, is negative private speech. When “listening to the speaker ceases”, because the speaker continues to speak, but doesn’t notice that the listeners are “not paying attention anymore”, the listeners experience negative emotions, because the speaker is “leaving” them to be their “our own speaker and listener.” We don’t want to listen to ‘ourselves’ because we were abandoned in NVB. 

Schlinger’s verbal fixation, which according to this writer distracts us from the embodied experience of spoken communication, is apparent from his focus on the intraverbal behavior, which “probably also is important in more complex forms of listening, for example, those that go by such names as, abstraction, inference, comparison, evaluation, extrapolation and so on.” Schlinger wouldn’t be able to make his point that “listening is behaving verbally”, if he would consider the big influence of nonverbal phenomena, such as the speaker’s sound on the listener. Although he admits this, he justifies dissociative, de-contextualized verbal behavior by saying that he is just trying to make a point. It is obvious that listening to a speaker must involve listening to his or her sound and if the speaker can be seen, it will also involve seeing his or her body language. Thus, listening, like speaking, is always behaving verbally and nonverbally. If it is his goal to prevent further isolation of the behaviorists from the community of scholars who are tackling complex behavior, Schlinger better addresses the ubiquitous fact that much verbal behavior is deeply problematic and confusing, because we don’t recognize that during NVB we say two entirely different things verbally and nonverbally.  As behaviorists know there is no difference between how verbal and nonverbal behavior is maintained by our environment, Schlinger’s verbal fixation is even more puzzling. The tenacity of his position is truly astounding. 

In spite of his great scholarly qualities, Schlinger only pays lip-service to emotion. He acknowledges its existence and leaves the door open to “use the term listener to refer to the individual who responds in any way to stimuli generated by a speaker’s verbal behavior”, but his focus remains verbal. Even Skinner’s quote “the listener reacts to the verbal stimulus with conditioned reflexes, usually of an emotional reflexes” (1957, p. 357) (italics added) doesn't bring our attention to the “function altering effects” of how we sound. The SVB/NVB distinction is needed to do that.