June 22, 2015

June 22, 2015

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Reader, 

This is my second response to “A Rose by Naming: How We May Learn How to Do it” by Greer and Longano (2010). I just came back from my friend Tanya, who puts videos of me on YouTube. We were walking over the Chico State University campus, trying to find the right environment. After checking out several places we ended up in front of a redwood tree. The recording went well and was finished within minutes. It brought home the important message that we don’t cause our own behavior, but that different environments cause us to behave the way we do.

In yesterday’s writing I was quoting the authors who wrote “naming is one of the three types of speaker-as-own-listener behavior.” I wrote about the second one “self-talk involving rotating speaker and listener responses aloud”, but didn’t go into the third one “correspondence between saying and doing.” 

In SVB saying equals doing, but in NVB there is a difference between the two. Similarly, in SVB, speaking is listening and listening is also, as Schlinger (2008) has reported, behaving verbally. However, in NVB, the speaker speaks at the listener, not with him or her as the speaker creates the illusion that he or she is separate from the listener. Separation of the speaker and the listener goes hand in hand with the false notion that individuals cause their own behavior. Due to SVB, the process of “naming” is “learned without instruction”, but due to NVB, due to coercive ways of talking, at an early age problems begin to occur as this important skill of "naming" will not be properly acquired.

Due to SVB, children at around age 3 experience “an explosion in vocabulary”, which was previously believed not to be “attributable to direct instruction,” but recent behavioral research “supports the notion that the mechanisms for children’s learning of words the things incidentally is, in fact, traceable to instructional histories and the ensuing stimulus control that lead to Naming as a, or the source of incidental language learning.” 

The lack of correspondence  between saying and doing, which co-occurs with the separation between the speaker and listener, is characteristic for NVB, because in NVB the speaker forces the listener to do as he or she says. In SVB, by contrast, the speaker controls the behavior of the listener with an appetitive, a positively reinforcing contingency and correspondence between saying and doing occurs as naturally as water flowing down. 

Absence of correspondence is an indication that NVB was going on. The not-doing or the occurrence of what is considered to be the inappropriate response is explained as by me as counter-control to NVB.  This brings us to the issue of iatrogenic effects. Due to NVB, which is as ubiquitous in mental health as anywhere else, many people are continuously harmed and re-traumatized by the very treatment that is supposed to alleviate their symptoms. 

Many students in my Principles of Psychology class have mental health issues or have family members who struggle. After they learn about SVB they realize how little SVB they have gotten from those who were supposedly helping them. They realize they were mistreated over and over again. To put this in perspective, NVB is everywhere, in parenting, nursing, teaching and in work situations. As it is happening everywhere It is not the fault of anyone in mental health that people are not getting the help they need. As long as SVB is not taught in colleges and universities we are not the getting the education we need, we are not getting the parental care we need, we are not getting the medical care we need and, we are not getting the leadership or government we need. The order of society will be changed by SVB. The disorder was a result of NVB. Diagnosing a person with a disorder is stigmatizing and ineffective, but talking about disordered environments leads to recovery from NVB.  

The child, but also the adult, must have “Naming experiences” in which “a child and a caregiver [or teacher and student] are simultaneously looking at, or in some other way sensing, a stimulus (referred to by other developmental psychologists as joint-attention) as a caregiver [or teacher] produces a vocal or signed response in the presence of a stimulus (e.g. an object).” 

Likewise, a learning process is involved in differentiating between SVB and NVB. If given enough time I can teach any adult about this distinction. Sensing SVB is more important than understanding it. Questions about SVB arise always in the absence of experiencing it. We are not experiencing SVB when we don’t listen to ourselves while we speak, that is, when our environment is aversive and we remain on guard. 

Although SVB can be seen, listening is of course of greater importance. However, listening is not our usual listening to others, but listening to ourselves. As will become clear in SVB, self-listening includes other-listening, but our previous focus on other-listening excluded self-listening. In NVB, we fail to listen to others as we are not listening to ourselves. We cannot listen to others if we are not listening to ourselves. If we are forced to listen to others, as we are in NVB, we cannot really listen to them and therefore we can only pretend to be listening. 

The best way to learn about the distinction between SVB and NVB is by “Naming” the voice of the SVB speaker, an appetitive stimulus or Voice II and the voice of the punitive stimulus, the aversive-sounding speaker, Voice I. The voice of the SVB speaker is Voice II and the voice of the NVB speaker is called Voice I. Unless we recognize Voice I, we cannot and will not recognize Voice II. Ideally, this distinction is learned in childhood.

The previously mentioned “joint-attention” which “requires both the auditory stimulus of the word that is spoken by the caregiver and the child attending to another feature of the stimulus” is also needed to learn SVB. When I teach about SVB, I explain what it is and then the student tries it out. When the student produces Voice II, I say this is Voice II, but when he or she produces Voice I, I say that is Voice I. It only takes a couple of such trials before the student is able to recognize NVB as NVB and SVB as SVB. This illustrates that the student already has a behavioral history in which he or she learned about SVB and NVB, but it only wasn’t named that way. Now that these universal subsets of vocal verbal behavior have got their name, things begin to  fall into place while experimenting with the great difference between SVB and NVB. Students are stimulated to explore the different features of Voice I and Voice II. Also, as part of this naming process, many circumstances are discussed and revisited in which the student was involved in a SVB or NVB conversation and a contextual understanding emerges as to why it happened. 

“Speaker-as-own-listener behavior” requires 1) “naming” and 2)  “self-talk involving rotating speaker and listener responses aloud” and 3)“correspondence between saying and doing.” The “self-talk involving rotating speaker and listener responses aloud” requires reinforcement to get it going. As adults learning about the SVB/NVB distinction students start with speaking and then they begin to take note of when they are listening and when they are not listening to themselves while they speak. As a teacher I enhance their ability to listen to themselves. Somewhere during this process students often remark things like “so, are you saying that when I am tense I am not listening to myself?” I then simply say to them: “I am not saying it, you are saying it” and then they usually get it. Suddenly they hear themselves and they realize the speaker-as-own-listener. 

When this learning process occurs in a group, other students who go through similar experiences serve as a good example.  This enhances the accuracy with which others are able to recognize SVB and NVB in themselves and each other. When someone speaks and I ask the others if they recognize it as Voice I or Voice II, they learn quickly. Students are also encouraged to stop me if I produce NVB. I then remove myself from where I was lecturing and when I produce SVB they have learned about the difference between the two. Certainly, this brings out negative and positive emotions, which are involved in NVB and SVB, but during this “Naming” process there is no need to delve into these emotions, that is, by thinking about these emotions a “multiple stimulus control” for SVB and NVB is created. What can then be called ‘conditioned listening’ involves “many speaker and listener bidirectional components of Naming.” Furthermore, “naming” of SVB and NVB not only results in “multiple stimulus control, it also results in multiple responses.” In SVB we all come alive.  

While learning about SVB and NVB students hone in on “role of environmental experiences.” Similarly to teaching children with autism spectrum disorders, who “would not have talked (or used substitute productive language), each new speaker often needs to be taught by direct reinforcement and correction” (underlining added). The speaking done with the purpose to hear ourselves, the integration of our private speech in public speech, has not been reinforced and will only occur if it is reinforced. Unlike those with autism spectrum disorders, we have talked, but it was mainly NVB and we haven’t had ongoing SVB. The reason we didn’t have it was because nobody taught it or could teach it. The environmental support was only there in moments of friendship, togetherness, trust and respect.  Learning SVB requires reinforcement of a student’s speaking and listening behavior.

To speak with the sole purpose to listen to it is a different way of speaking than the way of talking that we are used to, in which we speak to make others listen to us. If we don’t speak there is nothing to listen to, but if we speak, we are usually having NVB, because we don’t listen to our sound while we speak. In SVB, however, we speak and simultaneously we listen ourselves. “Naming results in the exponential expansion of vocabulary, or more specifically, the joining of the listener and speaker functions for observed stimuli.” This is joining creates SVB.

June 21, 2015

June 21, 2015

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Reader, 

In “A Rose by Naming: How We May Learn How to Do it” by Greer and Longano (2010) the authors write about what “naming” means in the analysis of verbal behavior. The meaning of “naming” is as we usually understand it, except that “in the analysis of verbal behavior the integration of behavioral processes involved is identified as a particular higher order verbal operant that is an important milestone in a language development.” “Naming” also involves “integration of the initially separate listener and speaker responses.” 

I am interested in “naming” as Horne and Lowe (1996) wrote about it as “the beginning of becoming truly verbal, because it fused the listener and speaker functions” (underlining added). I discovered that in Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB) “beginning” of merging “listener and speaker functions” finally matures. In SVB the speaker listens to him or herself while he or she speaks. 

In Verbal Behavior (1957) Skinnner had already described the process of “naming” as “speaker-as-own-listener.” When a child learns to say shoe, he or she does so because as a listener he or she responds to a speaker, who says shoe in the presence of a shoe. The child learns to respond to shoe with the word shoe and when someone else says shoe, the child knows what it is. 

These responses happen under different circumstances and thus, listening and speaking behaviors were acquired at different times. The saying “waiting for the other shoe to drop”, derived from a living situation in which one person is awakened by an upstairs neighbor, who is taking off his shoes and drops them on the floor. Interestingly, the person who was woken up, first is a listener, but then becomes a speaker. However, this listener had already acquired the word shoe and so the saying came about naturally and “without any instruction.” 


Another way of thinking about this is that the listener was talking with him or herself, while being annoyed by the regular noise he endures from his upstairs neighbor. Proper use of this saying involves more than only the shoe and comes about when the “speaker-as-own-listener” describes to him or herself what is happening and subsequently waits for the other shoe to drop. This private speech is essential to SVB, because in only SVB the mature adult, who knows that a shoe is a shoe and a spade a spade, can become more complex in his or her use of language. 

I have verified and explored with thousands of individuals that there are basically only two ways in which we talk: one is called SVB and the other is called Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB). Once we listen to ourselves while we speak, we are embarrassed by the fact that we seldom do this. In NVB speaking and listening behaviors are out of sync and disjointed. When we don’t listen while we speak, we actually neither listen nor do we really speak. 

 

Our talking has become so superficial, because in most of our verbal episodes we are not a “speaker-as-own-listener”, that is, most of our interactions are NVB and only very few are SVB.

Only if we name it that way will it change, but since we haven’t even done that, we keep beating around the bush. SVB exists and since it is defined as the “speaker-as-own-listener”, it is key to “the advancement of a science of verbal behavior.” 

If we want to have a complete account of verbal behavior, we need to have, as Skinner once emphasized, “separate but interlocking accounts of both speaker and listener” (underlining added. This interlocking account must necessarily be able to emerge while we speak. Writing and reading about “speaker-as-own-listener” is not the same as talking about this very important topic.

Greer and Longano, who look at children’s verbal development, emphasize “Naming seems to have been overlooked.” Indeed, without being able to name things children are unable to learn language. I look at adult’s verbal development and I observe that without being able to name and discriminate SVB and NVB, we remain unaware, mechanical and insensitive in each one of our conversations. Certainly, for children “Naming is foundational to more advanced verbal development, including how to read and write” and to development of “functions such as intraverbals”, but “naming" is also important for adults as it is necessary for becoming a conscious and mature communicator. 

Shouldn’t adults know how to “name” and differentiate the difference between the pretension of talking (NVB) and real talking (SVB)? The only reason we don’t think there is real talking is because we have gotten away with our NVB. There has to be a process as real talking. The extent to which our talking is real determines what we are able to accomplish with it. However, since most of our talking is NVB, we are not accomplishing many happy, healthy and supportive relationships. For that SVB is needed. Certainly, we accomplish many other things, but all of that is achieved at the expense of our relationships.

Horne and Lowe (1996) have defined “naming” as becoming acquainted with the “essentials of an unfamiliar object or topic.”  It is awkward for adults to admit that they are “unfamiliar” with something so common as talking and listening. It may seem as if we know, but when we look into why we have such high rates of NVB and such low rates of SVB, it is obvious while we talk that most of our attention goes to our speaking behavior and hardly any attention goes to our listening behavior. 


The reason for this great discrepancy is that in NVB the speaker aversively controls the behavior of the listener. In NVB, we are and we have to be on guard. We don’t and we can’t let our guard down as we feel continuously threatened, attacked, intimidated, pushed around, dominated and coerced. As most of our attention goes to speaking, we don’t and can’t create, let alone maintain, the safe environments in which SVB will occur. 

“Fusion of speaker and listener within the individual” will reliably occur if we “name” and identify, that is, experience, SVB. The experience that the speaker can in fact be his or her own listener is new to anyone who is introduced to SVB. Although many people recognize it as a possibility, it is new in that they have never experienced continuous support for it. 


We know SVB instances from being with friends, loved ones and people we care about and who care about us. However, we have at best achieved only a few moments of SVB, which happened accidentally, but we were unable to have SVB deliberately, consciously, skillfully and knowingly. “Integration of the listener and the speaker repertoires of human behavior” requires a unique environment, one which is free of aversive stimulation. 

Interestingly, the authors write about “naming” as “one of three types of speaker-as-own-listener behavior.”  The other two are “self-talk rotating speaker and listener responses aloud” and “correspondence between saying and doing.”  Yet, the authors have only thought about “when a young child rotates speaker and listener roles during solitary play” (underlining added). In SVB, adults rotate speaker and listener roles, while talking aloud with others, but they can also have SVB by themselves. 

“Typically developing 5-year-olds emitted distinct speaker and listener responses as they talked aloud to themselves while playing” (underlining added), when they feel safe. The same is true for adults; it is only when we feel safe enough with one another that the contingency is created and maintained in which SVB reliably occurs. The absence of playfulness in our way of talking is our response to an aversive environment. 

Usually, other people are that environment. The existentialist Jean-Paul Sarte correctly stated “Hell is other people” in his play called “No Exit.” However, it is not simply other people, who cause us to feel a particular way, it is our relationship with them or rather the lack of it, which determines that we end having NVB. 


In 1965, Sarte explained in a speech which preceded performance of his play that his statement “hell is other people” has often been misunderstood. He said “it has been thought that what I meant by that was that our relations with other people are always poisoned, that they are invariably hellish relations. But what I really mean is something totally different. I meant that if relations with someone else are twisted , vitiated, then that other person can only be hell. Why? Because when we think about ourselves, when we try to know ourselves… we use the knowledge of us which other people already have. We judge ourselves with the means other people have and have given us for judging ourselves. Into whatever I say about myself someone else’s judgement always enters, but that does not at all mean that one cannot have relations with people. It simply brings out the capital importance of all other people for each of us. “ Sarte sounds like a behaviorist!

Sarte gives an analysis which is in tune with SVB. To the extent that private speech is a function of NVB public speech, we are stuck with a judgment of ourselves, with negative self-talk. He  said that blaming others was not what he meant. He referred to the disconnect which occurs within the “speaker-as-own-listener.” When Sarte points to “someone else judgments” he acknowledges the gap between the speaker and the listener. Obviously, “twisted and vitiated relationships” cause this gap, while supportive and positive relationships will close this gap. 

The “other” who Sarte refers to in his quotation, is “that by which we define ourselves, and the punishment of his three characters is that they will only ever be able to define themselves through the distorting mirrors of other people who reflect them badly, while at the same time they see themselves reflected badly in others as well” (Woodward, 2010). Thus, the existential crisis Sarte talks about is brought about by NVB, but can be solved by SVB.

Estelle, one of the characters in Sarte’s play says “When I can’t see myself in the mirror, I can’t even feel myself, and I begin to wonder if I exist at all. Inez promises to be an accurate mirror for Estelle in order to seduce her. Sarte used the idea of the mirror to great effect in the play – there are none in hell, and in order to see themselves, as it were from the outside, the characters have to rely on the way that others see them” (Woodward, 2010)(underlining added).  Our covert private speech is a behavior which is caused by the overt public speech of others, who are our environment. 

June 20, 2015

June 20, 2015

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Reader, 

TodaY, I was having an appointment with someone who didn't show up.  Later, I saw him at the Open Mike. He apologized for not getting back to me. I had looked forward to working with him and so it was a disappointment. 


While seated and ready to see the performances, a lady came in who sat in front of me with her laptop open. It distracted from the performance. When I asked if she could  close her laptop she became angry and said “I am working.” Also, I saw a person from the radio station, but he barely said hello. I felt ignored because he sat and talked with other people. 

When it was my turn to perform, the CD didn’t play as it had been printed on a computer and I sang another song than I had planned. It went well, but it was without music. I felt vulnerable to the  rowdy crowd. The place was hot and noisy. It was still nice to see a few of the regulars and I enjoyed some of their songs and acts. It now seems the positive barely outweighed the negatives. 

Events effect us in an accumulated manner. I saw one singer who sang a beautiful song last week. I was hoping to hear him again, but for some reason he left and he seemed worried about something.Earlier that evening, when the lady with the laptop came to sit in front of me, I somehow knew it was not going to be an enjoyable event. A moment I had thought of leaving, but I decided to stay as the two people, I talked with, who were waiting to hear me sing. They were a brother and a sister, but they had to catch the last bus home and so they had to leave before I sang. 

They were the best part of the evening. I had explained to her about Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB) and, like her brother last week, she totally got it. She said it meant a lot to her and I asked why? She explained she always believed she was not deciding her own behavior and that others were influencing her to be one way or the other. She spoke of her experience as a mother and stated that she had to distance herself off from her addicted daughter who was negative towards her. I validated her and I praised her decision to live with her brother as they could be the positive support to each other, which they hadn't been able to find alone.

June 19, 2015

June 19, 2015

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Reader, 

These are happy days for me. I am alone at home a lot as I am only working two days a week. Yesterday I jogged through Upper Bidwell Park to my favorite spot near the Chico Creek. It is so very different to swim in the creek than in the swimming pool at the gym. I meditated while I sat on the  lava rocks. As I closed my eyes it came to me that I had nothing  to talk about with myself. I am more peaceful these days. I have been writing beautiful songs to melodies of classical music and it dawned on me that I have always been attracted to adagios.  

We are going to have our house painted in Chinese yellow with green for the rims and dark read for our front door. Yesterday evening we ate roasted lam. As I was busy with the BBQ in the back yard, I saw a red dragon fly landing on a pole in the vegetable garden. Since my wife had also seen him, a thought of her father occurred. We laughed and said that he was coming to visit us disguised as a dragon fly. I went to bed early and woke up early. It is still dark and it is cool. There are gaps of silence in which there are no thoughts. The thoughts which appear are calm and satisfying. I have found another melody to which I will write some lyrics. When I hear beautiful music the words come by themselves. I love to sing and these new songs make me sing.

As I was jogging in the hills of Upper Bidwell park I realized how much I love this rugged North Californian land. I like to jog and jump over rocks. It makes my jogging a more stimulating event then when I jog on a flat path. My body constantly adjusts to the elevations of the path and that gives me energy. I was reminded of the times we hiked through the mountains and feel fortunate to have come to know the joy of being in nature. Many people don’t know about this. Usually I don’t meet anyone on my way.


While watching water flowing over the big black boulders my thoughts were about climate change and water scarcity. While people dry up their laws, I was sitting on a rock near this pristine creek. With one ear I could hear the sound of the creek upstream and with the other ear I could hear the sound downstream. The sound of the creek seemed to be streaming through me and it was so refreshing, so beautiful and abundant. After taking a bath and meditating my jogging was invigorated. I ran bear-chested along the trail which gave me different views of the creek.  

My body feels healthy. I am grateful my parents taught me that walking is good. I am reminded I need to repair my bicycle with tools I borrowed and give back tomorrow.  I like riding my bicycle in the park with Bonnie and will do that this weekend. My writing is one day ahead. A while ago, it was five days ahead, but lately, I have been taking it so easy that I am back to the right day. I play this game to write ahead of the day which is happening and enjoy the feeling of being ahead of my time. 


Today I meet someone who plays classical guitar and we are going to see if he can accompany my songs. He is very good. I heard him perform a week ago. Also, tonight there will be open mike at the Has Beans coffee shop. I plan to sing two songs and recite a poem. Each time I was there everyone loved what I was doing. I enjoy having found such an appreciative audience. 

Someone from the Open Mike had called me and had asked me to talk with him about Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB). He had experienced and understood it. It had changed his conversations with his friends. During our conversation he became so quiet that I had to ask: “Are you still there?” He answered he was soaking in what I was saying. I could tell he was a very sensitive person, but often misunderstood and not feeling validated. He said that he was looking forward to hearing me sing my next song.  

With this writing I have jumped ahead another day and it is such fun to be able to do that. My life is arranged differently because of this playful perspective. It is a creative phenomenon.  I hope that you, the reader who reads this, will be inspired and hopeful as it is to you that I am writing and talking.