February 10, 2015

February 10, 2015

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Behavioral Engineer

Dear Reader, 

“Meaning is not a property of” Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB), “of behavior as such, but of the conditions under which behavior occurs.”  This writing is a second response to the paper “B.F. Skinner’s analysis of verbal behavior: a chronicle” (2007) by E.A. Vargas, J.S. Vargas & T.J. Knapp. From moment to moment, under different conditions, SVB or Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB) happen.  Verbally, the conditions of our interaction stay the same (we only speak English and don’t usually switch to another language), but non-verbally, our conversations change very rapidly and continuously. However, this change often goes completely unnoticed. 

The SVB/NVB distinction addresses these nonverbal and verbal changes. When we switch from SVB to NVB or visa versa, we are temporarily in different environments and we engage in different languages. Since our neural structures are affected by these changes, in the SVB speakers and listeners pay attention to their body, but in NVB meaning is lost because communicators are unaware of stimuli occurring within their own skin. 

“Technically, meanings are to be found among the independent variables in a functional account, rather than as properties of the dependent variable.” (Skinner, 1957/ 1992, p. 14) Embodied conversation is the dependent variable. SVB is meaningful, because we discriminate stimuli, independent variables, within our own body of our embodied conversation. When people loose meaning, they unknowingly refer to losing touch with their own body.

NVB is inaccurate in that it can’t and doesn’t identify the variables of which our talking, thinking and feeling is a function. The  environment within our skin is affected by the environment outside of our skin. Skinner suggests we need “a view of explanation and causation  wherein explanation is reduced to description (Skinner, 1930, p. 38). We will only have SVB to the extent that “all observed values of independent and dependent variables are provided and their paired relationships are specified.” 


This writer addresses the change which must occur in our way of talking as we substitute the concept of causation with the concept of function. That this transformation hasn’t happened is because it has not been  properly addressed. Certainly, people have argued about this matter, but their argument couldn’t lead to description of the SVB/NVB distinction. 

This writer discovered something which was so reinforcing that he was compelled to pursue it. He noticed by producing a particular sound that he was able to think and speak better. This sound energized him, calmed him and reassured him and made him feel good. He was able to continue to speak with this sound and discovered that SVB is based on sounding good. 


Others, to whom he explained this, felt the exact same way. They too were able to produce a specific sound which had a positive effect on them. Moreover, by simultaneously listening themselves and to each other they engaged in a form of communication, which was experienced as novel and beneficial. The simplicity and parsimony of SVB is powerful and elegant. 


To most of us it comes as a big surprise and relief that there is a way of communicating which is so completely effortless. It is apparent to all the communicators that they are authentic, that they are listened to and taken serious and that their ability to speak and listen is enhanced by their own sound. Many issues can be addressed while the topic of the conversation keeps fluidly changing. Everyone gains from SVB although not everyone will speak or needs to speak. In SVB things are said which need to be said, but which couldn’t be said in NVB.  In SVB we can finally say what we had wanted to say and feel confident about it and satisfied with it. In SVB we experience the positive consequences of real conversation. 

     

Two of Skinner’s findings coincide with this writer’s  work. For Skinner “A big step occurred when he automated the recording in a rectangular runway so that the organism, not the experimenter, initiated each run” (italics added). This writer realized it is not what he, an experimenter, does with the participant, but what “the organism” does by him or herself. 


When the participant “initiated each run” he is able to obtain accurate measurements. This meant the end of any attempt to change others. He lets them decide whether they join or not. As a teacher, he doesn’t try to get students to his class. They show up for the duration of a semester and he works with those students who respond to his SVB. This may sound strange, but the fact is that only positive reinforcement works and so NVB must be ignored. Although initially not everyone is equally involved, during the semester, more and more students get SVB and by the end of the semester, the entire class gets it. 


In the stable, reinforcing environment this writer creates, the different rates of responding of individual students become more harmonized over time. Another similarity with Skinner is that “the real power over rate of responding lay in its relation to how immediate postcedents were programmed.” Students who are anticipating reinforcement reinforce this writer, their teacher and this process is getting better and better as the semester progresses. 


Skinner’s contribution was that he differentiated postcedently controlled operant behavior from antecedently controlled reflexive or respondent behavior. A gradual shift of focus from respondent to operant behavior took place for this writer. This involves the replacement of NVB by SVB. This writer proposes the same shift to all his students and he engineers the classroom environment in such a way that it can and will happen.

February 9, 2015

February 9, 2015

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Behavioral Engineer

Dear Reader, 

 

Like B.F. Skinner, this writer arrived at the constructs of Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB) and Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB) “slowly and inductively”. This writing is a response to “B.F. Skinner’s analysis of verbal behavior: a chronicle” (2007) by E.A. Vargas, J.S. Vargas & T.J. Knapp. 

During SVB our spoken communication is a function of contingency-control that is shared by both the speaker and the listener, because they take turns, but during NVB only the speaker controls the contingency because there there is no turn-taking. As a seminar leader, this writer “developed his experimental work within this framework and depended on research results to adjust and modify his theory.” The fact that this writer is now writing instead of speaking about the SVB/NVB distinction, is evidence of the process of “behavioral selection” in which all his findings are grounded. This writer doesn’t offer “an exercise in interpretation”, but presents his experimental results as they occur.  

Skinner stated about Verbal Behavior (1957) “What I am doing is applying the concepts I’ve worked out experimentally to this non-experimental (but empirical) field” (Skinner, July 2, 1934). This writer, by contrast, has worked out his SVB/NVB concept experimentally. His writing about the SVB/NVB distinction is experimentally sound and empirically validated, that is, all those who have explored this distinction with him have acknowledged its importance. For a long time, laboratory work, that is, interaction with people, was more important to this writer than theory, but, as this writer learned about behaviorology, he began to acknowledge the importance of theory.

Skinner too wondered about the importance of theory. In “Are theories of learning necessary” (1950), he emphasized that “theories must be couched in the dimensional framework of science subject matter” so that “any range of behavioral phenomena may be accommodated within a contingency selection framework.” Skinner’s thesis started with a review on the reflex. He summarized the early work as “an attempt to resolve, by compromise, the conflict between observed necessity and preconception of freedom in the behavior of organisms (Skinner, 1930, p.9, underlined emphasis Skinner’s). 

During his seminars, this writer also “dismissed any notion of agency as a guiding force in the behavior of any organism” while he introduced the participants to SVB, in which they reject this ancient compromise, which was perpetuated by NVB and “still resonates in the present “theory of mind””. Stated differently, as a communication facilitator, this writer has successfully introduced hundreds of groups and individuals to the irrefutable, scientific fact of “the speaker as a locus”, thus setting the stage for SVB. He also demonstrated that the speaker as “an initiator” sets the stage for dualistic, problematic NVB.  Although during NVB the speaker definitely controls the contingency and doesn’t allow the listener to become the speaker, there is no reason to “assign spontaneous control to the special inner self called the speaker” (1957, p. 460). 

When we explore during our conversation the two different response classes called SVB and NVB, we find that the replacement of the latter by the former involves the substitution of agency by contingency. Skinner’s emphasis on contingency can be traced back to his earlier interest in correlation. Similarly, this writer noted that two different sounds, Voice II and Voice I, correlated to SVB and NVB, which are two distinctively different sets of behavior. 

This writer feels validated by Skinner’s earlier interest in correlation which “was not correlation in a statistical sense”, but “the correlative relation between two (or more) events.”  Skinner’s assertion that “a scientific discipline…must describe the event not only for itself but in its relation to other events (Skinner, 1930, p. 37) (italics added by this writer) is applicable to the SVB/NVB distinction. Moreover, with this distinction we are capable of seeing how one SVB event is contiguously connected to another SVB event, how one SVB may evoke a NVB event, how one NVB event is connected to another NVB event and how one NVB event may give rise to a SVB event.  Indeed, “No event is a stimulus independent of its relation to another event called a response, and no event is a response independent of its relation to another event called a stimulus.” SVB and NVB are two operant classes of verbal behavior that give us a much-needed “a frame of reference.”

In the following sentence Skinner describes this writer’s behavior: “The definition of the subject matter of any science is determined largely by the interest of the scientist. We are interested primarily in the movement of an organism in some frame of reference.” Due to his behavioral history this writer was always interested in the question: why do we talk the way we do? That question represents a longing for better communication. “An internal change” of being moved had “an observable and significant effect” upon a new way of communicating in which meaning and frame of reference are created by the extent to which we are listening to ourselves while we speak. During SVB, but not during NVB, we can “reflect” on the “four-term contingency that builds upon the prior two or three term ones.” Only during SVB can we comfortably and inductively begin to take notice of the “overlapping properties of the behavioral, biological and physical events involved both inside and outside the body” (1992) E.A. Vargas.

February 8, 2015

February 8, 2015

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Behavioral Engineer

Dear Reader, 

This is the final response to “Listening is Behaving Verbally” (2008) by H.D. Schlinger. It is unclear at this moment if anyone will ever appreciate or validate this writing, but this writer remains hopeful, because he has acquired the vocal verbal behavior of which this writing is a function. This skill didn’t come easy, but he is certain that he has it and he enjoys using it. This writer has given up organizing groups, because it was always a problem to attract participants. However, in the psychology classes he teaches, he works with two groups for the duration of an entire semester. 

The dream, from which he just woke up, had two parts. In the first part he was at his house where people had gathered to participate in a group. He was delighted to see such a large group. Never before had so many people showed up. Before the group could get started, however, a leaking toilet had to be fixed and after that was done the group began. In the meantime, tea had been shared and everyone was calmly waiting to get started. When this writer finally came in everyone was ready.  

        

In the second part of this peaceful and peculiar dream, this writer was watching how a painting was painted by an old painter, who was seated at the harbor. The painting depicted the sea as seen from the harbor. He could see the buildings along the cay with its freight-boats and yachts. One ship was on its way leaving the harbor. The painter explained that the horizon was far away, but also very near and while looking at the reality and then again at the picture, this writer began to have a sense that leaving and arriving was the same.  

  

When this writer was a child, his father justified hitting him on his head and ears by saying “Those who choose not to listen, will have to feel.” If this writer did something that irritated his father, he would say in a threatening way “Do you want me to give you buzzing ears?” or “My hands are itching to give you a good beating.” He had no idea that his voice as a speaker continuously negatively affected his son as a listener. 

Another one of his often repeated statements was, paradoxically “No matter what it is, we can always talk about it.” At times, they talked, but, as his father was always putting himself above him, this led to arguments and a sense of rejection and frustration for this writer. 

Now that his father is very old, this writer doesn’t have any contact with him anymore. His knowledge about behaviorism and behaviorology has made him loose interest in anyone who is ignorant about the science of human behavior. Yet,  even most of those who know about behaviorism are unable to engage in the conversation in which he can demonstrate Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB) and Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB). Since only what is written matters to them, he began to write about it. 

By commenting on their papers he can make his findings clear. He is not interested in proving them wrong. Most of the time, they are quite right, but since their analysis doesn’t involve SVB and NVB, something essential is always missing. He knows something that they don’t know, but his unequal relationship to them is that they will make it seem as if they know something which he doesn’t know. 

Although it is true there is still a lot to learn about behaviorism for this writer, the often repeated principle “If it can happen, it will happen, but if it doesn’t happen, it can’t happen” helps this writer to accept when SVB can’t happen or when only NVB can happen. He is no longer interested in behaviorologists or anyone, who, like his father, coerces him, because he enjoys expressing, exploring and verifying his SVB/NVB distinction. 

The point of Schlinger’s “brief speculative analysis is that appealing to the ongoing discriminated verbal behavior of the listener represents a parsimonious approach to explaining how verbal stimuli condition the behavior of the listener without resorting to analysis at other levels.” 


This writer, however, insists on an analyses at other levels. SVB and NVB are different response classes of the listener, when he or she becomes a speaker. The turn-taking that is involved in listeners becoming speakers and in speakers becoming listeners, characterizes the difference between SVB and NVB, which are operant behaviors and respondent behaviors that are caused by the nonverbal components of verbal stimuli. Words when spoken are sounds, which condition the behavior of the listener. 

Schlinger, who states “a rule is any verbal stimulus, irrespective of who utters it” leaves unanalyzed the fact that SVB and NVB function “to condition the behavior of the listener." In the absence of the SVB/NVB  distinction “the ubiquity of verbal stimuli that condition a listener’s behavior” cannot be well-organized. Moreover, “the different approaches to rule-governed behavior by behavior analysts” make the concept virtually meaningless. As rule-governed behavior is characterized by our verbal fixation, it will not allow us to acknowledge the two ways of talking, which even every uneducated communicator is ready to admit. 

Although the behavior of speakers “is conditioned by listeners who are specially trained to respond to such behavior”, it is only under certain circumstances “that listeners also become speakers.” Such occurrences are much more rare than is often assumed. In NVB listeners never really  become speakers, as NVB speakers are prevented from listening to themselves. In NVB speakers force listeners to listen to them.  NVB speakers don’ t listen to themselves, although others are listening to them.

The fact that much listening is behaving nonverbally, reflexively, prevents  people from understanding what is being said.  “Many basic linguistic processes” are not at all as “common to both speaker and listener” as we might be inclined to believe. This writer agrees with Hayes and Hayes, who wrote that speakers and listeners only share a history of training with “arbitrarily applicable relations sustained by social conventions” (1989, p. 182). Only in SVB are there “linguistic features common to both speaker and listener.” Only in SVB “the communality is that both individuals engage in verbal behavior.” Only in SVB is the public speech of the speaker identical to the private speech of the listener. In NVB, in which the public speech of the speaker is never identical to the private speech of the listener, in which this commonality is missing, as the speaker remains the speaker and the listener is not allowed to become the speaker, there is no verbal behavior in the strict Skinnerian sense. Rather than behavior that is mediated by others, it is behavior that is forced upon others. To ignore this important difference is to ignore the SVB/NVB distinction. 

According to Schlinger, only when listeners are “also speaking (mostly echoically and intraverbally) they are said to listen (or paying attention or understanding).” This is an exact description of SVB. The NVB speaker has a different effect on the private speech of the listener than the SVB speaker. There is a big difference in the listening, paying attention to and understanding that is a function of feeling threatened and intimidated and of being positively reinforced. The NVB listener was drilled to follow orders and obey the NVB speaker, but the SVB listener was trained to respond to and reciprocate the SVB speaker. These are two opposing conditioning processes. Although there is variability, most of us have only received a very small amount of SVB, but a lot of NVB conditioning.

February 7, 2015

February 7, 2015 

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Behavioral Engineer

Dear Reader, 

 

This writer insists on context. This fifth response extends what is described in “Listening is Behaving Verbally” (2008) by H.D. Schlinger. As long as behaviorists don’t analyze the elephant in the room, that what we say is a function of emotions of how we say it, their writings will have a de-contextualizing effect. For pragmatic reasons, we need to be able to tact and differentiate the communication of our positive and our negative emotions. Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB) and Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB) are not theoretical constructs; they are two response classes every human being experiences, every day. 

It has become clear to this writer, while working with thousands people, that our fixation on the verbal, on what we say, stops us from paying attention to the nonverbal, to how we sound, to how we feel while we speak. Like other behaviorists and behaviorologist, who are trying to account for verbal behavior, Schlinger’s writing gets redundant due to his verbal fixation. Although he describes “forms of listening”, as “echoic”, “joint control” and “intraverbal” and acknowledges that “echoic responses may function as Sd for intraverbal responses that can both condition new verbal behavior” and “evoke other intraverbal responses either about what the speaker is saying or that have nothing to do with what the speaker is saying” (italics added), the distinction between what we say and how we say it plays only a minor role in his analysis. However, he emphasizes that when the listener’s intraverbal responses have nothing to do with what the speaker is saying, then “listening to the speaker ceases (we are said not to be paying attention anymore) leaving us to be our own speaker and listener.” Why this may occur, is left unanswered. 

Listeners are less likely to listen to speakers who are not listening to themselves. When speakers are listening to themselves, they are easier to listen to and learn from. Speakers who listen to themselves evoke in the listener the same phenomenon, they invite the listener to be a speaker who listens to him or herself too. Moreover, SVB is the conversation in which speakers and listeners switch back and forth between being a speaker and a listener. In NVB there is no such turn-taking. 

In NVB, listeners hardly speak and speakers hardly listen. Speakers with more SVB repertoire are always turned off by speakers with less SVB repertoire as speakers with less SVB repertoire always have more NVB repertoire. Speakers with more SVB repertoire are always turned off by speakers with more NVB repertoire. And, the same is true for listeners. 

Listeners with more SVB repertoire are turned off by speakers with more NVB repertoire and are even disturbed by other listeners who have more NVB repertoire. However, the opposite is not true: NVB speakers are not the least troubled by SVB listeners and are not at all influenced by SVB speakers. Most likely, NVB speakers turn SVB listeners into NVB listeners. SVB listeners are good at pretending to be listening, because they don’t want to get in trouble. Moreover, NVB speakers most likely turn SVB speakers into NVB speakers. Stated differently, we are much more easily influenced by negative than by positive emotions in our interactions with others. 

What Schlinger fails to mention is that the listener’s self-talk, which is a function of being turned off by the speaker's sound, is negative private speech. When “listening to the speaker ceases”, because the speaker continues to speak, but doesn’t notice that the listeners are “not paying attention anymore”, the listeners experience negative emotions, because the speaker is “leaving” them to be their “our own speaker and listener.” We don’t want to listen to ‘ourselves’ because we were abandoned in NVB. 

Schlinger’s verbal fixation, which according to this writer distracts us from the embodied experience of spoken communication, is apparent from his focus on the intraverbal behavior, which “probably also is important in more complex forms of listening, for example, those that go by such names as, abstraction, inference, comparison, evaluation, extrapolation and so on.” Schlinger wouldn’t be able to make his point that “listening is behaving verbally”, if he would consider the big influence of nonverbal phenomena, such as the speaker’s sound on the listener. Although he admits this, he justifies dissociative, de-contextualized verbal behavior by saying that he is just trying to make a point. It is obvious that listening to a speaker must involve listening to his or her sound and if the speaker can be seen, it will also involve seeing his or her body language. Thus, listening, like speaking, is always behaving verbally and nonverbally. If it is his goal to prevent further isolation of the behaviorists from the community of scholars who are tackling complex behavior, Schlinger better addresses the ubiquitous fact that much verbal behavior is deeply problematic and confusing, because we don’t recognize that during NVB we say two entirely different things verbally and nonverbally.  As behaviorists know there is no difference between how verbal and nonverbal behavior is maintained by our environment, Schlinger’s verbal fixation is even more puzzling. The tenacity of his position is truly astounding. 

In spite of his great scholarly qualities, Schlinger only pays lip-service to emotion. He acknowledges its existence and leaves the door open to “use the term listener to refer to the individual who responds in any way to stimuli generated by a speaker’s verbal behavior”, but his focus remains verbal. Even Skinner’s quote “the listener reacts to the verbal stimulus with conditioned reflexes, usually of an emotional reflexes” (1957, p. 357) (italics added) doesn't bring our attention to the “function altering effects” of how we sound. The SVB/NVB distinction is needed to do that.