July 18, 2015

July 18, 2015

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Reader, 

 

This is the eleventh writing which includes findings that were reported by the animal researchers Owren and Rendall in their paper “An affect conditioning model of nonhuman primate vocal signaling” (1997).

Now that I have entered my writings of the missing days, I am ready to write about the paper. I am happy to be on track again. I surprised myself by accomplishing this with one-page entries, which came out pretty good. It also felt good to keep the title of this paper listed as  my writing remained under discriminative control of what I was reading in that paper. 

“The most basic proposal of our model is that individual primates use vocalizations to produce affective responses in conspecific receivers, thereby influencing subsequent behavior of those animals.” 

Apparently, I have been proposing this affect induction model ever since I discovered Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB) and Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB), two universal subclasses of vocal verbal behavior, which dovetails with and are explained by this research on primates.

As the “sorts of learning involved in habituation and Pavlovian conditioning are ubiquitous among animals and occur even in the simplest nervous systems, these principles appear to provide a promising starting point.” 

Hitler’s voice was not experienced as an aversive stimulus by the millions of people who saluted him with “Heil Hitler.” However, those who were occupied by the Nazis, they didn't feel his voice as inspiring and energizing.