August 6, 2014

August 6, 2014

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Behaviorist

Dear Reader, 

After weeks and weeks of heat it has started raining and it is suddenly pleasantly cool. The air is fresh and a new energy is felt by everyone. Meanwhile this writer has done his audition and has also given a presentation of Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB) at his work. The committee that was judging whether this writer was going to be able to do a presentation for a bigger audience consisted of people who were not very open. The five minute audition didn’t go as well as the presentation for the parolees and the probationers who this writer is working with.

When attention is given to the antecedent control of verbal behavior, to what discriminative stimuli caused people to say what they said, we talk about the environmental independent variables which have an effect on the dependent variable, the body of the communicator. It is important to realize here that this interaction between environment and the body of the verbally behaving organism is a completely natural and continuous affair. When we think about how a single verbal episode came about, we easily lose sight of how all our verbal behavior is continuously caused by our environment. So, when we are verbally trying to predict variables that define the nonverbal environment and the nonverbal body, we are likely to get out of touch with the nonverbal functional aspects of our behavior.

The aforementioned disconnect between the verbal and the nonverbal causes us to communicate in a manner which this author describes as Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB). In NVB our fixation on the verbal takes our attention away from what we nonverbally experience while we speak. Our attempts to find behavior-controlling antecedent stimuli for our verbal behavior, which are measurable and thus verbal, are instances in which the verbal inevitably becomes more important than the nonverbal. Once verbally analyzed, while manipulating these antecedent stimuli, we still maintain our verbal bias. 

  

We unknowingly become ‘disembodied’ when our own verbal behavior is the environmental event on which we focus our science. The amount of reinforcement we receive for our verbal behavior depends on the extent to which others, who are our environment, embody or disembody our language. So-called equality or inequality among people pertains to how we speak. In the former, we have an instance of SVB, because we speak with each other, but in the latter, we have an instance of NVB, because we speak at each other. 

Only SVB is embodied communication, but NVB is disembodied communication. In our search for behavior-controlling antecedent stimuli, we overlook the physiological responses of our own body as part of the environment. By asking ourselves how we speak, we find out about why we say what we say in the way that we say it.