January 19, 2015

January 19, 2015

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Reader, 

 

Before we can define Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB), we must first define Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB) from which it emerged. Just as our verbal behavior emerged from our nonverbal behavior phylogenetically, that is, over the course of our evolutionary history, as well as ontogenetically, that is, over the course of our life time, so too does our SVB arise from our NVB. The hungry nonverbal child cries and produces an early version of NVB, but when it is fed and comforted, the parent is delighted by the sound of its well-being and proud of its verbal behavior development.  Similarly, our cat comes to sit with us on our lap and reinforces with its purring sound our petting behavior. The cat’s body was changed by our petting and will produce loud-sounding, repetitive behaviors in the absence of our willingness to cuddle it. All babies and cats behave in this manner. Like nonverbal animals, humans avoid pain and stress and behaviors which make it go away are negatively reinforced. 

As we don’t look at our behavior from an operant perspective, we fail to see of what our arguing, coercing, screaming, complaining, fighting, retaliating, defending, attention-grabbing, obsessing, hoping, dramatizing, intellectualizing, harassing, weight-gaining, drug-using, tv-watching, book-reading, competing, pretending, manipulating, torturing, bragging, posturing, distracting, stressing, escaping, undermining, praying, destroying, doubting, failing, isolating, rejecting and self-defeating behavior is a function. All NVB is negative reinforced.

Since we don’t pay attention to functional relationships, we don’t make the distinction between SVB and NVB, but once we do that, it becomes easy to see our persistence on NVB is because we don’t know how to have SVB. Just as autistic children may manifest self-injurious problem behaviors, such as biting, hitting, head-banging or eye-poking, which are functionally related to task difficulty, attention-seeking or dislike for a person or a place, individuals who are not afflicted by autism, suffer from a similar inability to express their needs verbally and effectively, in such a way that they can be met. There is no difference between the autistic child, who succeeds in getting the attention from his parents with self-injurious behaviors and the NVB verbalizer, who is mediated by the NVB mediator. The parents of an autistic child inadvertently reinforce its problem behaviors in the same way as NVB mediators perpetuate the NVB of the verbalizer and themselves as verbalizers.

The lack of communication skills of an autistic child is a little more apparent than the lack of communication skills of the NVB verbalizer, but once we begin to distinguish between SVB and NVB, it becomes apparent that we keep recreating problems with our NVB as don’t know how to communicate in such a way that we don’t do this. No matter how successful people seem to be in getting away with their NVB, a more accurate analysis by this writer has time and again revealed that it is primarily a function of our lack of communication skills. In SVB, we communicate in a better way and anyone who has made the distinction between SVB and NVB has agreed on this. However, more than agreement is needed to learn SVB.