March 13, 2015

March 13, 2015

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Behavioral Engineer

Dear Reader, 

Today’s writing is second part of this writer comments on “Separate Disciplines: The Study of Behavior and the Study of the Psyche” (1986) by Fraley and Vargas. Before he will go into responding to this paper this writer wants to write about the conversation that took place in the Principles of Psychology class which he teaches at Butte College.

Yesterday the students had their Midterm. Since it didn’t take them longer than one hour to complete the exam, this writer had planned an extra credit opportunity for his students. They received 20 extra credit points for staying 20 minutes and engaging in an exploration of Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB). Unlike in the previous evening, this time the entire class stayed. The 20 minutes went by fast and no one got up to leave. 

The mini-seminar went on for 45 minutes and everyone contributed. Even those who didn’t talk enjoyed it. They nodded in agreement, laughed and followed what was said by others and this writer. When 45 minutes had passed there was an atmosphere of peacefulness which was felt by everyone and each student who had talked gave a concluding remark. 

One person said in almost all other classes students are not allowed to speak and are expected not to speak. She even stated that she felt afraid to ask a question. While acknowledging the well-being created by our SVB, she made a statement about the Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB) we are all used to and conditioned by, with which everyone agreed. Although she was speaking with herself and thinking out loud, she was asking this writer “If SVB is so easy, so simple, so relaxing and so reinforcing, why do we..” she paused.. then finished her sentence “continue to...abuse each other?” 

Here was a student, who was reinforced for her newly acquired SVB by the newly created verbal community, the class. Another student asked “but, you must be conscious first before you can have SVB?” She then rephrased that into “wait....SVB makes you conscious.” A third student, her face beaming with joy, said “I am in harmony.” A fourth one wondered out loud “but how do you apply this?” This writer asked him to express what he thinks how this might work? He said slowly “So, when SVB can keep going, it applies itself to whatever we are talking about?” He added “So, it can be applied to learning, relating, working, parenting..?” 

Although nobody answered, the answer was there. Someone connected NVB with “survival of the fittest”, but then went on to describe SVB as “the conversation we have when there is no longer the need to struggle to survive.” Another student said “when in NVB you can’t say what you want to say, you feel as if you are not supposed to exist.” This writer agreed that NVB is basically dissociative in nature. When the talk was over, it was evident that everyone was quiet and content. 

This accumulative effect was a surprise to one student, who had been working that day at her job in customer service. She had learned “not to respond to negativity, to the NVB which so many people express.” Her remark reminded others of the question how to apply SVB and the ability to distinguish between SVB and NVB. She said “Unless customers ask me a question, I basically try not to respond, because unless they express their real concern I can’t help them anyway.” 

During SVB we express our real concern. Not every question is equally necessarily. Viewed from the SVB/NVB distinction, most of our questions are unnecessary and negative demands. The more we know about SVB, the more we realize that many of our NVB questions are best completely avoided. They don’t need to be answered and will fall by the way side. 

“Separate Disciplines” (1986) by Fraley and Vargas should have been about SVB and NVB. Although they describe the serious problems and negativity  involved in NVB, they don’t view talking as the reason why people do what they do and why, in spite of its relative success, behaviorology hasn’t gotten much traction. They write “In only a few institutions out of hundreds has the behavioral faction been able to attain a political majority and give its department a behavioral tone” (italics added). Although they refer to how behaviorists sound, they only do so figuratively, not literally. 

This writer insists on the literal interpretation of what can and should be called the “behavioral tone.” Only that tone can enhance our vocal verbal behavior and relationship, because it is not and cannot be aversive. If it is, then it is not a “behavioral tone.” Such a tone of voice has to be different from “a political majority”, from the “developmentalists, Freudians, Rogerians, so-called humanists, information theorists, brain-mind epiphenomenalists, and so on-in short, cognitivists of all sorts.” Stated differently, the “behavioral tone” transcends all nonsense that goes on in the name of politics. Moreover, behaviorology has to be distinguished from psychology, in the same way that SVB has to be separated from NVB.   

Since nobody identified NVB as our political way of talking, which is full of slight-of-hand tricks, the appropriation of behavioral principles by those who only wish to promote unscientific foolishness, continues to this day. Thus, cognitivists can keep on exploiting behaviorism by translating it into “their work, their literature and by speaking of it in their terms”, because NVB has not been addressed. This would have never been possible if the “behavioral tone” had not been ignored. Endless laments about “the operating style whereby the political majority appropriates control of the knowledge base, insures control over the professional recognitions, the acclaim, the enhanced opportunities, and even wealth” didn't work and never had any positive effect as it represented and perpetuated NVB. 

How people talk has far-reaching consequences. Branch and Malagodi (1980) stated that “a behavioral faculty member, isolated among assorted cognitive psychologists, eventually succumbs to the reinforcement and punishment practices of the immediate verbal community.” Theoretically more SVB-inclined behavioral faculty members are affected by the dominant NVB community. In other words, they are not reinforced for their SVB, but punished for it. At issue was not and is not the “necessary political compromises and necessary accommodations forced upon behaviorists”, but our way of speaking. NVB “obviously occurs under nonscientific contingencies.” It can easily be seen, heard and measured, but behaviorists have looked at, listened to and measured other things, which supposedly were more important. What do Fraley and Vargas mean when they say that many behaviorists have “become smooth-tongued accommodators?” (italics added). 

The NVB verbalizer’s movements of his or her tongue produces a response product, a sound, that aversively controls the mediator’s verbalizing behavior, but the SVB verbalizer’s tongue, by contrast, produces a very different sound, which positively reinforces the mediator’s verbalizing behavior. How does this nonverbal “slippage from [verbal] contingencies of scientific work” occur? Are behavioral psychologists really “deprived of the opportunity" or did they "lack the courage of their convictions by not getting very good at convictions in the first place?” This writer thinks too much emphasis has been placed on what has already been said. Since we haven’t had SVB for a reliable period of time, there is, other than actually doing the experiment, no way of knowing, what we would say or what we would be able to come up with, when we would have one hour, two hours, three hours of SVB. It is 2015 now and we still haven’t started our SVB conversation, because the distinction is not yet know to most scientists.

Like Skinner, this writer claims something new. During his first year at Harvard Skinner (1928) wrote “But my fundamental interests lie in the field of Psychology, and I shall probably continue therein, even, if necessary, by making over the entire field to suit myself” (italics added). In SVB the verbalizer suits him or herself, because he or she speaks only with a sound, which he or she experiences as positively reinforcing.

March 12, 2015

March 12, 2015

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Behavioral Engineer

Dear Reader, 

 

In today’s writing this writer comments on “Separate Disciplines: The Study of Behavior and the Study of the Psyche” (1986) by Fraley and Vargas. They address the incompatibility of the study of behavior with the study of the psyche and want behaviorology, the natural science of human behavior, to be completely separate from psychology. Besides this call for this long overdue parting, their paper is also an attempt to shed new light on the minimally discussed, but crucially important fact that disciplines are “defined through technical exercises” but “function through exercises of political power.” By asserting themselves as a separate discipline, “a number of difficult issues” are believed to be “confronted.” However, this writer wonders if they dealt with the most important issue: how do we talk about this matter? It doesn’t look like it. 

No doubt they mus thave talked about it among themselves, but how behaviorologist talk with those who are not familiar with this new discipline is hardly even mentioned. This writer addresses a different way of communicating directly, because vocal verbal behavior that is involved in “political power” is as incompatible with vocal verbal behavior involved in discussing “laboratory data”, as behaviorology is incompatible with the contemporary psychology. The assertion of behaviorology as a separate discipline starts, but doesn’t end by giving it name. 

As this writer firmly believes that behaviorology is not merely a toothless paper tiger, sucking on, hiding under and hanging onto psychology-mommy’s dried up tit, he insists that unscientific talk, which he calls Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB), must be permanently separated from Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB), which is the only scientific way of communicating. 

     

It is because the distinction between SVB and NVB hasn’t been made, that psychology can continue to claim its politically correct, but false scientific status. Behaviorists and later, behaviorologists, like Fraley and Vargas, may not yet have paid much attention to how they speak, but at least their research roots out the ubiquitous but detrimental illusionary notion of causation of behavior by an internal agent. Historically, behaviorists and behaviorologists have been marginalized, because they didn’t and couldn’t cave in to this widely accepted explanatory fiction. Although most of the behaviorist's attention mainly goes to autism, it is no coincidence that the behaviorist’s success is primarily in improving spoken communication.  

The label “behaviorology” signifies the “need for a term descriptive of our science in its broad sense” (italics added). It would be ridiculous to say that biology is a science only for biologist. It is equally silly to say that behaviorology is only for behaviorologists. Behaviorology as well as biology are two scientific disciplines which can benefit everyone. The need for behaviorology to be a descriptive science lies in the fact that it deals directly with behavior, particularly, our vocal verbal behavior. Psychology’s patchwork of different perspectives is further removed from SVB than behaviorism and behaviorology. Those who have explored SVB, agree that behaviorism and behaviorology explain and validate it. 

To scientifically attend to how we talk, we must have a descriptive science of behaviorology. Only a descriptive science can give us the much-needed expressive, illustrative, vivid environmental account of what actually takes place when we talk. Certainly we can write about it, but we must also talk about it. Our written accounts have led to all sorts of dead ends, because they couldn’t accurately account for how we communicate. Presumably, all our different written theories each held a piece of the puzzle, but the conversations in which these pieces fit together couldn’t happen.

Behaviorologists should know by now people’s “commitment” was never, as many continue to believe, in “cognitivism.” This writer claims it was never even the content that made people repeat the same falsehoods, rather it was the context in which people communicated, which caused them to talk and write the way they did and do. As the context, the environment in which we talked wasn't addressed, behaviorists, behaviorologists as well as cognitivists, non-behaviorist and non-behaviorologists have continued to talk in the same way they have always done. That is, NVB has carried on unabated and nothing was done to replace this problem behavior. 

Although research has focused on behavior, vocal and sub-vocal verbal behavior, which precedes anything written, is left out. Consequently, we still live with the illusion that something written can inform us about how we talk, when the exact opposite is true: only something spoken, in private or in public speech, can set the stage for what we write. We put the horse behind the wagon if we assume that something written can inform us about how we speak. It is against the natural order of things. Unless we first talk about it, privately with ourselves or publicly with others, our writing will disconnect us from ourselves and from each other. This is exactly what has happened, as our writing became more important than what we said. SVB reverses this detrimental process, which undermines our human relationship. Our predetermined way of talking that resulted from what was written and what was read, is NVB, which doesn’t inspire, stimulate or energize us. Before we can “agree” on behavior as our subject matter, we must first “agree” to focus on our verbal behavior as our subject matter, so that at long last we can acknowledge the immense difference between SVB and NVB. Without SVB it is unlikely behaviorology is going to prosper.

March 11, 2015

March 11, 2015

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Behavioral Engineer

Dear Reader, 

Today students took their midterm exam. As there was time, this writer invited them for extra credit opportunity to participate in an exploration of Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB). If they stayed for an extra  15 minutes, they would receive 20 extra credit points. Twenty out of the thirty students stayed and after 15 minutes there were still 7 students left. 


The lively conversation had brought up many personal issues and was intensely beautiful. One student remarked that SVB has to do with one's person’s ability to self-soothe. This writer fully agreed and explained that this was exactly how he had come to find out about it. It was not that someone had once came to him and taught him what SVB was. No. Like the students, this writer had also once struggled with what he was feeling and what he was really thinking, but things had changed after he had found that gong and began to listen to himself while he was talking to himself. 

It was precisely this self-soothing effect, what in behaviorism is known as automatic reinforcement, which kept him going. Like his students, he knew it was possible, but was also constantly doubting it and again and again losing it and forgetting about it. However, because it was so valuable to him, he kept trying figure it out, remember it and find it back. And, he did.

The two students who talked the most expressed a lot of frustration and often required this writer to intervene, so that the talk wouldn’t derail in Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB). They were hurt and upset and saw their chance to express their negative feelings about how they had been treated by others. Although at times they were quite forceful, they were still correctable and they trusted and allowed this writer to adjust their way of talking. Their emotional involvement was validated and justified. 

Another student spoke of the many conflicting parts of herself, which past she had been unable to bring together. It was due to SVB that she was having the notion that it was possible to have the experience that all the parts can came together. However, as long as NVB keeps going, the different parts of us will continue to be at war with each other. This led to meaningful discussion of how public speech affects our private speech. 

The students were impressed by the fact that when there is SVB, there is no negative self-talk to be figured out anymore. They talked with each other about what to do when one is affected by negative thoughts and feelings. One student suggested we can talk with ourselves, ask ourselves questions and be our own listener, when others are not listening, cannot give us an answer or don’t want to talk. This was approved by this writer and well-received by others, because it was a perfect elaboration of SVB. 

Then it was said SVB didn’t even need to be understood, but must be felt. This too was acknowledged by everyone and this writer explained that understanding SVB happens as a consequence of experiencing it. The students were delighted, they got it. This writer stated that attention for how we sound makes us tune into nonverbal behavior. The words we speak are aligned with how we say it. This connection is maintained by our sound.

One student stated we are not used to experiencing empathy. Others confirmed that we live in a world in which coercion is common. Another student spoke of the anger he felt about insensitive people. This writer acknowledged how this negativity affects us and explained how important it is to recognize or discriminate Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB) for what it is, not get in trouble over it and avoid it as much as possible. This led to more talk about our need to be alone and to explore SVB by ourselves. 

Someone must encourage us that we can be alone and figure it out. One student said to another: when we learn to be alone and at peace with ourselves, we will find and recognize others with whom we can have SVB. We must have SVB with ourselves first, before we can have it with others. Another student was only listening and when she was asked to speak, she didn’t know what to say. However, it was okay for her not to say anything and not to feel bad about it like she had been feeling so often before. She seemed relieved and serene. She received nonverbal agreement from the other students. They nodded to her and smiled. This writer explained that SVB is about nonverbal agreement which makes verbal agreement possible. Without this nonverbal agreement we are forever trying to achieve verbal agreement, but we are never quite getting there. In NVB we keep being busy with trying to agree or trying to agree to disagree, but since we keep fixating on the verbal, our nonverbal agreement is not an option. 

As the conversation carried on this writer saw and heard how his students were inspired by their SVB. He suggested that one day they may be the ones to teach this to others. Now that he is writing this, he wants to change it assuring them they will be the ones to teach this to others. His teaching is changed by this interaction with his students. He is going to encourage them by telling them that they can and will be able to do this. He told them already, but not as emphatically as this writing right now. 

He praised the students who stayed longer to have more conversation. He  explained their familiarity with and attraction to SVB was due to their behavioral history. By being given the purpose to teach SVB to others, they will be more inclined to learn it. It is so exciting to still discover new aspects about teaching SVB. He will empower his students to teach it. One student said it was clear that she was now feeling at ease and she realized that this was needed for her to be able to say positive things. Also, she stated very calmly that she couldn’t talk like this when she was upset.

March 10, 2015

March 10, 2015

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Behavioral Engineer

Dear Reader, 

 

It was only by talking out loud with himself that this writer finally became capable of prolonging his Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB) and decreasing his Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB). This is what he suggests to the reader. It was after he began to experience more SVB by himself, by talking out loud and by listening to his voice while he speaks, that he became capable of explaining this to others, who reinforced him, because it worked. 

There has not been one seminar or session in which this writer wasn’t able to explain it to others. Only in the very beginning, when this writer still wanted others to listen to him, to understand him, to agree with him and to approve of him, was he again and again having NVB instead of SVB, because he was trying to impress others and he was trying to convince them, struggling to get and keep their attention and trying to say it in ways that would have an impact, but that always had an adverse effect. 

The three reasons why we keep having NVB, were later identified as three pins on the gong, which prevents it from resonating. First, our outward orientation, based on the unwritten NVB-rule that we must listen to others, but not to ourselves, makes us speak with a sound that feels uncomfortable to us. Second, the fallacy that we are responsible for our own behavior, that we supposedly cause it, makes us struggle to get the approval from others. Third, when we are not at ease, we try to control our environment, others, with words; that is, we fixate on the verbal and disconnect from the nonverbal. These three traditions: 1) outward orientation, 2) struggle for attention and 3) verbal fixation, change the way in which we sound. In NVB we remain trapped by these related communication routines, but in SVB, these habits have been stopped.

March 9, 2015

March 9, 2015

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Behavioral Engineer

Dear Reader, 

 

This writer acknowledges the great difference between thinking about something and saying what one is thinking about out loud. He found that when he gives himself the chance to express his thoughts, thinking is not bothering him, but if he keeps thinking what he is thinking without saying it, eventually his thoughts become burdensome for him. So, there is a qualitative difference between the thoughts that are only thought and those which get to be expressed. Often, when he expresses to himself what he thinks, listening to himself while he speaks ‘his mind’, immediately alleviates the heaviness he was feeling while having these thoughts. It is remarkable this has such automatically reinforcing effect. He has gotten so used to this that his life has been shaped by the consequences of this. He can always say to himself what is going on, but other people, who don’t know about Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB), wouldn’t be able to handle it. 

Our commonly shared Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB) is based on the fallacy that we cannot and should not even say to ourselves what we think and feel. We have come to believe this utter nonsense because of the way in which we talk with each other. As long as we can’t say to each other what we think, we end up having private speech in which we can’t say to ourselves what we think. The fact, however, remains that we can and should say to each other what we think and that we can and should say to ourselves what we think. It became clear to this writer, that even when others are given permission to talk freely about whatever they think, they are only able to do this to the extent that they are stimulated to listen to their sound while they speak. Only SVB gives us a sense of control over our thoughts, that is, only during SVB do our thoughts become calm and coherent. In NVB, on the other hand, we are controlled by our thoughts which are the products of threatening and hostile environments.