October 13, 2015

October 13, 2015

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Reader,

This writing is my seventeenth response to “The Unit of Selection: What Do Reinforcers Reinforce?” by J.W. Donahoe, D.C. Palmer and J.E. Burgos (1997). The following statement explains that even Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB) public speech can reinforce Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB) private speech, which, once said out loud, becomes SVB public speech. Although NVB communicators punish those with SVB, this can strengthen SVB communicators to create the circumstances which will permit SVB. 

The “interpretation of punishment provided by the unified reinforcement principle predicts that aversive stimuli should be able to function as reinforcers under some circumstances: If the operant that precedes the aversive stimulus is topographically similar to the responses elicited by the aversive stimulus, then the aversive stimulus should strengthen the operant.” The NVB speaker’s voice is “topographically similar to the response” that is “elicited” in the listener. Mostly, NVB public speech will elicit NVB overt speech in the listener if he or she speaker, but, it will also elicit covert speech. To the extent that the listener has had a history of SVB public speech, he or she will have SVB covert speech which will compete with the NVB private speech that is elicited by the speaker’s NVB public speech.

Also the SVB speaker can be experienced as punishing by the listener with strong a NVB history and strengthen this behavior in him or her as a speaker. The listener then experiences NVB private speech that overrules the SVB private speech elicited by the SVB public speech. If the speaker can express his or her NVB, he or she will make the SVB of the speaker impossible, but if prevented, he or she will be affected by the SVB public speech and accumulate more SVB private speech, which will then begin to counteract his or her NVB private speech. I have very often experienced this phenomenon and have been puzzled about it.

Most people who came to my seminars were attracted to it in the first place due to their behavioral history of high rates of SVB. In psychology class, however, I work with a more diverse population: there are those students who have behavioral histories with high rates of NVB and there are those who have high rates of SVB. I am no longer interested in giving one-time-event seminars as I found teaching more rewarding. It is also much more challenging, but this keeps me on my toes. I can only keep the attention of the class by creating as much room for this variability to be expressed and acknowledged. By patiently explaining the SVB/NVB distinction again and again, my students are shaped into having more SVB and less NVB. The rule is that NVB, like cussing, is simply not allowed in my class. Although those with a strong NVB history will once in a while say disturbing things, this happens less and less as the semester proceeds as it is discriminated that this is NVB. Moreover, the punishment of those with more NVB history by those who have more SVB history is very mild and therefore more effective as even the most aggressive, closed, defensive and dominating students are becoming gradually becoming more mellow, friendly and social.

With the sound of our voice, human beings signal, like primates, when it is safe to affiliate. By engaging in SVB they begin to discriminate the possibility of “internal reinforcement.” NVB is not internally reinforced and demands a constant external approval. In NVB, the speaker forces the listener to listen to him or to her and the listener feels coerced to listen to the speaker. Since the attention of both the speaker and the listener is on ‘the other’, NVB is based on our outward, ‘other-directed’ attention. Stated differently, NVB excludes expression of the speaker-as-own-listener, while SVB is based on it. “The availability of more extensive circuitry for mediating internal reinforcement would reduce the difference between the rate of acquisition of CRs and Rs and, in so doing, enable aversive stimuli to more readily function as reinforcers for some operants.” We have not merely evolved to have language, but we have also evolved to be able to punish NVB and to attain SVB.

Our “vulnerability to the temptations of aversive stimuli” is created by our growing up in a verbal community that punishes behaviors of those who don’t adhere to the existing hierarchy. Some time ago, European kings and queens ruled by divine right, but this dominance changed and the king of the Netherlands is now only a representative of his country. Our “vulnerability to the temptations of aversive stimuli” may make us decide that we should only punish NVB and reinforce SVB, in the same way that English people only reinforce spoken and written English language in their verbal community. As humans developed language, verbal behavior was selected and reinforced while the primitive non-verbal behavior was punished. “The greater demands placed on the internal reinforcement mechanism by the need to modify the connectivity of the larger, more deeply layered brains of primates (including ourselves) may have exacted a price—vulnerability to the temptations of aversive stimuli.” Is “vulnerability” why we have mental disorders as we are tormented by the inability to reinforce ourselves?

The worst part of NVB public speech is that it becomes NVB private speech, in which people constantly punish themselves as their covert speech is replete with “aversive stimuli”. While punishment was done by others, things were straightforward: You got your head chopped off, you were tortured, executed or imprisoned, you were hit or you were shamed publicly if you misbehaved, but how do we find out that we do this to ourselves in NVB? If we can’t our NVB causes psychopathology. During NVB we are unable to “modify the connectivity of the larger, more deeply layered brains.” Indeed, all we are doing is making things worse. For a long time, using brutal force was adaptive, but that is no longer the case. Survival of modern men depends on the ability to become more refined. This requires us to become knowledgeable about how these “internal mechanism of reinforcement” actually work. To discriminate the workings of the modification of our “deeply layered brains”, we need to be able to make our unconscious private speech overt, so that we can hear it and become conscious about it.