December 1, 2014

December 1, 2014

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer,

Dear Reader, 

 

Because he was reading about it, this author was thinking about respondent conditioning and respondent extinction. Particularly, he thought about how the body automatically mediates a response to someone’s aggressive voice. The body is innately predisposed, which means it is structured such that energy from a loud voice instantly elicits an unconditioned reflexive response. Thus, when we are yelled at, we immediately go into a fight, flight or freeze response. And when, as in the childhood of this author, parents repeatedly yell to get their children’s attention, the child is inadvertently conditioned to only take them serious, to listen, when they raise their voice. It is easy to see that this common way of getting a child’s attention has many problems. 

A child’s ability to focus on what is being said, its ability to learn, is shut down by a coercive tone of voice. Of course, the child will try to avoid and move away from such an aversive stimulation. This is exactly what happened to this author, who is still recovering from the trauma that was inflicted upon him, particularly by his father. Since an admonishing, harsh tone of voice was repeatedly paired with various negative experiences of punishment, such rejection and abandonment, for a long time this author was unable to learn. He considered himself a failure, because he simply couldn’t stand how certain teachers sounded and he was unable to listen to what they were saying. Each time he heard a particular tone of voice, he was experiencing a conditioned fear response. What most people would experience as a neutral stimulus, he experienced a conditioned stimulus. Like dogs that salivate to the sound of a bell, this author struggled each time he heard what only he experienced as a disturbing sound. His conditioned fear response to how many people sounded had generalized and made him hate everyone, who, according to him, just didn’t sound right.   

In respondent conditioning, which was discovered by Pavlov, a neutral stimulus, such as a bell, becomes a conditioned stimulus as it  elicits salivation in a dog, because it was repeatedly paired with the presentation of the unconditioned stimulus, food. This author grew up liking only those very few people and was liked by them, who sounded good, but he disliked the sound of almost everyone. To this very day he insists that most people just sound terrible. It is due to this problem that this author discovered the two mutually exclusive ways in which individuals across the globe behave verbally. In SVB there is absolutely no aversive stimulation.