December 26, 2015

December 26, 2015

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Students,

This is my tenth response to “The Personal Life of the Behavioral Analyst” by D. Bostow (2011). My Chinese mother-in-law once noticed about me: “when you happy, everybody happy!” When we are happy together, I will let you know. It is my nature to do so and I’ve found I am not the only one who is inclined that way.  Aren’t we all happy when everyone around us is happy? Such a situation makes Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB) possible, the kind of interaction in which everyone is positively affected. 

I was at such a situation yesterday night at the Open-Mike at the Grange in Paradise. I felt welcome and the people were so kind and appreciative. I sang a sad gypsy song, but it came out really good. I never performed that song before, but I was able to bring out many of its profoundly emotional nuances. 

Bostow suggests “We can recover the strengthening effects of personal daily accomplishments”, “reduce our carbon footprints”, and “restore the connection between our behavior and its strengthening effects,” but he doesn’t describe the verbal behavior that is needed to make this possible. Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB) could not accomplish this. How can interaction in which the speaker negatively affects the listener lead to any positive consequences? It couldn’t and it didn’t.

During SVB our verbal behavior is under stimulus control of the pleasant sound of our own voice. We sound good and feel peaceful and calm. During SVB we do not only let each other know that we like to listen each other’s voice, but we also let ourselves know that we enjoy and relax into our own tone of voice. 

Denial of what happens within our skin, which is in my opinion much more important than what happens outside of our own skin, occurs only during aversive circumstances in which we produce NVB. In SVB there is no such dissociation. To the contrary, in SVB we are conscious of what we experience within our own skin and we can describe it. Our accuracy depends on the environment which makes SVB possible. 

In SVB, we stimulate each other to listen to ourselves while we speak. This is NOT a matter of careful planning. Such future orientation characterizes NVB and prevents our individual focus on the-speaker-as-own-listener. “It is the time for each of us to develop a broader repertoire of vocations in which we apply our behavior-analytic technical skills.” SVB is a behavioral cusp which will make many other reinforcing behaviors possible.