June 22, 2015

June 22, 2015

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Reader, 

This is my second response to “A Rose by Naming: How We May Learn How to Do it” by Greer and Longano (2010). I just came back from my friend Tanya, who puts videos of me on YouTube. We were walking over the Chico State University campus, trying to find the right environment. After checking out several places we ended up in front of a redwood tree. The recording went well and was finished within minutes. It brought home the important message that we don’t cause our own behavior, but that different environments cause us to behave the way we do.

In yesterday’s writing I was quoting the authors who wrote “naming is one of the three types of speaker-as-own-listener behavior.” I wrote about the second one “self-talk involving rotating speaker and listener responses aloud”, but didn’t go into the third one “correspondence between saying and doing.” 

In SVB saying equals doing, but in NVB there is a difference between the two. Similarly, in SVB, speaking is listening and listening is also, as Schlinger (2008) has reported, behaving verbally. However, in NVB, the speaker speaks at the listener, not with him or her as the speaker creates the illusion that he or she is separate from the listener. Separation of the speaker and the listener goes hand in hand with the false notion that individuals cause their own behavior. Due to SVB, the process of “naming” is “learned without instruction”, but due to NVB, due to coercive ways of talking, at an early age problems begin to occur as this important skill of "naming" will not be properly acquired.

Due to SVB, children at around age 3 experience “an explosion in vocabulary”, which was previously believed not to be “attributable to direct instruction,” but recent behavioral research “supports the notion that the mechanisms for children’s learning of words the things incidentally is, in fact, traceable to instructional histories and the ensuing stimulus control that lead to Naming as a, or the source of incidental language learning.” 

The lack of correspondence  between saying and doing, which co-occurs with the separation between the speaker and listener, is characteristic for NVB, because in NVB the speaker forces the listener to do as he or she says. In SVB, by contrast, the speaker controls the behavior of the listener with an appetitive, a positively reinforcing contingency and correspondence between saying and doing occurs as naturally as water flowing down. 

Absence of correspondence is an indication that NVB was going on. The not-doing or the occurrence of what is considered to be the inappropriate response is explained as by me as counter-control to NVB.  This brings us to the issue of iatrogenic effects. Due to NVB, which is as ubiquitous in mental health as anywhere else, many people are continuously harmed and re-traumatized by the very treatment that is supposed to alleviate their symptoms. 

Many students in my Principles of Psychology class have mental health issues or have family members who struggle. After they learn about SVB they realize how little SVB they have gotten from those who were supposedly helping them. They realize they were mistreated over and over again. To put this in perspective, NVB is everywhere, in parenting, nursing, teaching and in work situations. As it is happening everywhere It is not the fault of anyone in mental health that people are not getting the help they need. As long as SVB is not taught in colleges and universities we are not the getting the education we need, we are not getting the parental care we need, we are not getting the medical care we need and, we are not getting the leadership or government we need. The order of society will be changed by SVB. The disorder was a result of NVB. Diagnosing a person with a disorder is stigmatizing and ineffective, but talking about disordered environments leads to recovery from NVB.  

The child, but also the adult, must have “Naming experiences” in which “a child and a caregiver [or teacher and student] are simultaneously looking at, or in some other way sensing, a stimulus (referred to by other developmental psychologists as joint-attention) as a caregiver [or teacher] produces a vocal or signed response in the presence of a stimulus (e.g. an object).” 

Likewise, a learning process is involved in differentiating between SVB and NVB. If given enough time I can teach any adult about this distinction. Sensing SVB is more important than understanding it. Questions about SVB arise always in the absence of experiencing it. We are not experiencing SVB when we don’t listen to ourselves while we speak, that is, when our environment is aversive and we remain on guard. 

Although SVB can be seen, listening is of course of greater importance. However, listening is not our usual listening to others, but listening to ourselves. As will become clear in SVB, self-listening includes other-listening, but our previous focus on other-listening excluded self-listening. In NVB, we fail to listen to others as we are not listening to ourselves. We cannot listen to others if we are not listening to ourselves. If we are forced to listen to others, as we are in NVB, we cannot really listen to them and therefore we can only pretend to be listening. 

The best way to learn about the distinction between SVB and NVB is by “Naming” the voice of the SVB speaker, an appetitive stimulus or Voice II and the voice of the punitive stimulus, the aversive-sounding speaker, Voice I. The voice of the SVB speaker is Voice II and the voice of the NVB speaker is called Voice I. Unless we recognize Voice I, we cannot and will not recognize Voice II. Ideally, this distinction is learned in childhood.

The previously mentioned “joint-attention” which “requires both the auditory stimulus of the word that is spoken by the caregiver and the child attending to another feature of the stimulus” is also needed to learn SVB. When I teach about SVB, I explain what it is and then the student tries it out. When the student produces Voice II, I say this is Voice II, but when he or she produces Voice I, I say that is Voice I. It only takes a couple of such trials before the student is able to recognize NVB as NVB and SVB as SVB. This illustrates that the student already has a behavioral history in which he or she learned about SVB and NVB, but it only wasn’t named that way. Now that these universal subsets of vocal verbal behavior have got their name, things begin to  fall into place while experimenting with the great difference between SVB and NVB. Students are stimulated to explore the different features of Voice I and Voice II. Also, as part of this naming process, many circumstances are discussed and revisited in which the student was involved in a SVB or NVB conversation and a contextual understanding emerges as to why it happened. 

“Speaker-as-own-listener behavior” requires 1) “naming” and 2)  “self-talk involving rotating speaker and listener responses aloud” and 3)“correspondence between saying and doing.” The “self-talk involving rotating speaker and listener responses aloud” requires reinforcement to get it going. As adults learning about the SVB/NVB distinction students start with speaking and then they begin to take note of when they are listening and when they are not listening to themselves while they speak. As a teacher I enhance their ability to listen to themselves. Somewhere during this process students often remark things like “so, are you saying that when I am tense I am not listening to myself?” I then simply say to them: “I am not saying it, you are saying it” and then they usually get it. Suddenly they hear themselves and they realize the speaker-as-own-listener. 

When this learning process occurs in a group, other students who go through similar experiences serve as a good example.  This enhances the accuracy with which others are able to recognize SVB and NVB in themselves and each other. When someone speaks and I ask the others if they recognize it as Voice I or Voice II, they learn quickly. Students are also encouraged to stop me if I produce NVB. I then remove myself from where I was lecturing and when I produce SVB they have learned about the difference between the two. Certainly, this brings out negative and positive emotions, which are involved in NVB and SVB, but during this “Naming” process there is no need to delve into these emotions, that is, by thinking about these emotions a “multiple stimulus control” for SVB and NVB is created. What can then be called ‘conditioned listening’ involves “many speaker and listener bidirectional components of Naming.” Furthermore, “naming” of SVB and NVB not only results in “multiple stimulus control, it also results in multiple responses.” In SVB we all come alive.  

While learning about SVB and NVB students hone in on “role of environmental experiences.” Similarly to teaching children with autism spectrum disorders, who “would not have talked (or used substitute productive language), each new speaker often needs to be taught by direct reinforcement and correction” (underlining added). The speaking done with the purpose to hear ourselves, the integration of our private speech in public speech, has not been reinforced and will only occur if it is reinforced. Unlike those with autism spectrum disorders, we have talked, but it was mainly NVB and we haven’t had ongoing SVB. The reason we didn’t have it was because nobody taught it or could teach it. The environmental support was only there in moments of friendship, togetherness, trust and respect.  Learning SVB requires reinforcement of a student’s speaking and listening behavior.

To speak with the sole purpose to listen to it is a different way of speaking than the way of talking that we are used to, in which we speak to make others listen to us. If we don’t speak there is nothing to listen to, but if we speak, we are usually having NVB, because we don’t listen to our sound while we speak. In SVB, however, we speak and simultaneously we listen ourselves. “Naming results in the exponential expansion of vocabulary, or more specifically, the joining of the listener and speaker functions for observed stimuli.” This is joining creates SVB.