December 29, 2015

December 29, 2015

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Students,

This is my final (thirteenth) response to “The Personal Life of the Behavioral Analyst” by D. Bostow (2011). Bostow concludes “My hope is that these words may tip the balance towards behaviors the reader is already inclined to do.” I don’t think that words can or will tip the balance. Besides, I don’t “hope” for anything, I predict and everything I predict comes true. 

My predictions are not grandiose, but scientific. The results have achieved in my classes were as I predicted. So, yes, not words will tip the balance, but the sound our voice will do that. Stated differently, what we say makes more sense because of how we say it. During Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB) there is an alignment between verbal and nonverbal behavior, but in Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB) there is no alignment and we get carried away by what we say, by our verbal fixation. 

In NVB we disconnect from the nonverbal, from our embodied sound, as we are focused on and obsessed with the content. In academia and in society at large this means that written words have become more important than spoken words. SVB restores the importance of our experience of how we sound while we speak. We already achieve SVB each time we talk with those who love us, care about us, support us, respect us and welcome us. 

SVB isn’t anything new or something we don’t know. However, only a few us are familiar with SVB that goes on for a longer period of time. Not enough is known about the contingency needed to make that possible. We can discover this if we keep on listening to ourselves while we speak. Although contingencies that make this possible come “necessarily from our contact with others”, it is important to recognize that we can have SVB on our own. 

This self-experimentation, talking out loud and listening to our tone of voice while we speak, prepares us for both achieving and maintaining our SVB with others. To the extent that we can have SVB with ourselves we will be able to have it with others. 

“Stimulus control” of our voice is important, but “differential reinforcement gives prior stimuli their power.” We don’t need to wait for others to approve of us and tell us we sound good. Once we hear our own calm voice, we have achieved a behavioral cusp and know this makes social reinforcement possible. SVB develops the “interlocking local contingencies for personal behavior”, which “support our own direct contact with the world.”