July 3, 2016

July 3, 2016 

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Behavioral Engineer

Dear Reader, 

This is my eighteenth response to “Epistemological Barriers to Radical Behaviorism” by Donohue et al. (1998). I had a beautiful dream of a large family of various generations that was with me as they were all learning about Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB). We were slowly walking and talking through a park and when I spoke everyone stood still.

It was such an enjoyable event; small children were running around, grandparents were talking with their sons and daughters and bigger children were talking and laughing among themselves. Some parents pushed a baby carriage, held the hand of a toddler or carried their child on their shoulders. Each age group had their own conversations and as we walked and talked, the children were ahead and around us.

Before me walked teenagers and middle agers and behind me were the elders, who were going a bit more slowly. It didn’t matter that we were not covering much distance as there was time to meet and talk. During our walk the different generations got to meet and greet each other.

The dream stands in stark contrast with the cognitive psychologists, who still continue to think and teach that “people largely control their own destinies by believing in and acting on the values and beliefs that they hold” (Ellis & Grieger, 1977). Presumably, they “abstract information about their world, construct their experience of their world and synthesize this information into cognitive structures that direct behavior.”

In the area of psychopathology the dull cognitivists insist that “defective schemata” are “responsible for a variety of behavioral disorders, such as depression, mania, panic disorder and phobias” ( Beck & Weishaar, 1989; Craske & Barlow, 1993; Young, Beck & Weinberger, 1993). 

As a therapist, I have not met any mental health client who was helped by this cognitive view. To the contrary, I have consistently heard stories about how detrimental such treatment has been. Making the individual responsible for his or her own behavior is similar to blaming the victim. 

July 2, 2016

July 2, 2016 

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Behavioral Engineer

Dear Reader, 

This is my seventeenth response to “Epistemological Barriers to Radical Behaviorism” by Donohue et al. (1998). The authors argue that many people have used and have witnessed other people use” folk psychology “to account for human behavior for the first 20 years or so of their lives.” However, what people have been involved in and exposed to, was a way of talking which, according to them, accounts for their behavior.

During Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB) speakers justify and rationalize why they talk the way they do. Parents practicing coercive behavioral control may say to their children “I do this for your own good.” Along with the inevitable counter-control which results from such parenting  NVB continues to increase in response rate. When “during these formative years they also have witnessed very little challenge to these accounts” this simply means that their NVB was never challenged.

Those who know about the distinction between Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB) and NVB understand that challenging NVB never worked and only gave rise to more NVB. The contrast between SVB and NVB was never presented. Only from this contrast more SVB can be stimulated. By comparing one to the other we can and will all agree that SVB is better than NVB and that we should try to increase SVB and decrease NVB.

Once the distinction is clear, discrimination learning will effortlessly increase our rate of SVB. This is another criterion which has not been recognized: NVB is effortful and SVB is effortless. What should be made emphatically clear is that “most individuals who pursue formal education in the behavioral sciences begin” unknowingly with NVB. 

“Real education” from “folk psychology” to behavioral science never happened, as our challenge has always been to go from NVB to SVB. This also didn’t happen, but it would happen once behaviorists realized the importance of this distinction. “The more systematic and formal positions that the student encounters in the academy” require SVB.

July 1, 2016

July 1, 2016 

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Behavioral Engineer

Dear Reader, 

This is my sixteenth response to “Epistemological Barriers to Radical Behaviorism” by Donohue et al. (1998). Those who believe in folk psychology insist “that scientific research is best accomplished by group experimental designs.” The research which consists of “large groups of subjects” deals with averages, which doesn’t tell us anything about the individual. Behavioral science would have been more popular if more behaviorists would have chosen to apply science to changing the behavior of those who are suffering from mental health issues. 

Behaviorists with clinical experience make much more sense and are easier to be understood.  I am such a behaviorist. Sadly, for the most part, radical behaviorism isn’t practiced in the mental health field. What is practiced is a watered down version of radical behaviorism called cognitive behaviorism. The “Epistemological Barriers to Radical Behaviorism” are the same as the so-called cognitive distortions that cognitive behaviorists want their mental health clients to believe in.

To the radical behaviorist a person’s private speech has no causal status. Although private speech as well as public speech are both caused by environmental variables, what a person ends up saying or thinking to him or herself, his or her private speech, is mediated by the neural behavior of his or her body, which was conditioned by the extent to which it was exposed to circumstances in which there was Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB) or Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB). 

The manic behavior of a person with Bipolar Disorder goes hand in hand with negative self-talk and is indicative of a history of mainly NVB, which always occurred in abusive, hostile and chaotic environments. When one treats clients with such histories and hears these histories over and over again, one realizes that the path to recovery must consist of learning to prevent the environments which have caused the client's problems.

June 30, 2016

June 30, 2016 

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Behavioral Engineer

Dear Reader,

This is my fifteenth response to “Epistemological Barriers to Radical Behaviorism” by Donohue et al. (1998). The authors state quarely “From a folk psychological position, to attempt to reduce the causes of action to a small set of explanatory mechanisms, particularly a small set that has a large degree of overlap with explanations of the behavior of nonhuman animals, would deny the uniqueness of human existence and would not do justice to the complexity of human behavior.”

Presumably then it is only this different explanation, to which the folk psychologist seem to object. I think this is an oversimplification of what really happens. After all, it makes an enormous difference how this “small set of explanatory mechanism” is talked about. Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB), “reduction” of “the causes of action”, will always be perceived as denying “the uniqueness of human existence.”

NVB never did any “justice to the complexity of human behavior” as it simply couldn’t. In Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB), on the other hand, the speaker communicates his or her words with a tone of voice which pleases, invites, stimulates and validates the listener. In NVB, however,  the speaker’s voice is experienced by the listener as offending, hurting, threatening, attention-grabbing, coercing and oppressing.

The authors, who write like speakers, don’t account for how the speaker speaks. The listener or reader’s objection is not that “A simple set of explanatory principles would not do justice to the diversity and complexity of how people interact with the world, either alone or in groups.” How the speaker speaks and how the writer writes is at issue.

 

The NVB speaker/writer does not and cannot speak/write with the listener/reader. The NVB speaker/writer separates him or herself from the listener/reader. Separation of the speaker/writer and the listener/reader “would not do justice to the diversity and complexity of how people interact with the world, either alone or in groups.”