March 4, 2016

March 4, 2016

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Reader,

This is my fourth response to “Tutorial on Stimulus Control, Part 1” (1995) by Dinsmoor. He explains the difference between respondent and operant conditioning. After describing the former, he defines the latter as follows: “The experimenter had to wait for the animal to perform the desired action before the pellet of food could be delivered as a reinforcer. Because in this case the food was paired with a response, Skinner called it Type R conditioning.” 

Yesterday evening, I facilitated an Introduction to Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB). Therapist, teachers, parents and couples participated. The evening was a success and each participant committed to sign up for the seven evenings of my course. During the beginning of the meeting, I explained to the participants the Type S or respondent conditioning that is involved in SVB, but towards the end of the evening the dialogue was primarily about Type R or operant conditioning. 

It was effective to start my explanation, as Dinsmoor did, with respondent conditioning and then to move on to respondent conditioning. As Type S conditioning preceded developmentally Type R conditioning, it proved to be very helpful that I had been reading Dinsmoor’s tutorial. Also, because, unlike the psychology classes that I teach, in this course I can completely focus on behaviorism, it was possible for me to properly explain both of these forms of conditioning. 

After demonstrating with my gong that our voice is an antecedent stimulus, which either sets the stage for SVB (no pins on the gong) or NVB (pins on the gong), participants talked about the extent to which they were affected as listeners by a speaker’s voice. Then, they realized how their voice affects others. Thus, they first explored classical conditioning aspects of the SVB/NVB distinction and then went on to explore operant aspects, that is, how they reinforce or punish others.