March 18, 2015

March 18, 2015

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Behavioral Engineer

Dear Reader, 

 

This writer, who is a psychology instructor, gives his students the task to write a paper, which starts with the sentence “When I listen to the sound of my voice while I speak then..” In this paper students write about what happens when they pay attention to how they sound while they talk. The responses have been phenomenal. Each paper is a testimonial to the validity of Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB), the vocal verbal behavior in which the verbalizer produces a sound which positively reinforces the mediator. 

The two-page long papers from his students make clear how important it is for the verbalizer to recognize that the verbalizer and the mediator can be just one person. This writer just finished reading a great paper written by a female student, who described feeling self-conscious about how she sounds. She is often anxious around people who sound hateful and can’t seem to understand them very well, even if she tries. And, when she says something, which according to her was wrong, she continues to ruminate and obsess about it for hours. It is apparent from her writing that she is very hard on herself and is often trying to change herself. 

After summing up her insecurities about her communication with others, she states, she is nevertheless content with the way her voice sounds while she speaks. Moreover, she thinks that is the most important thing. On the one hand, listening to herself while she speaks makes her overly self-aware, but on the other, after talking for a while, she is completely at ease with it. Due to her writing, which represents her way of talking with herself, she is able to notice that in spite of her doubts, she is okay with herself. She predicts and strongly believes that the more she likes her own voice while she speaks, the more positive things will happen to her. 

These written reports are remarkably consistent. Many students write about the same thing. Listening to the sound of their voice while they speak makes them aware of how they were and are affected by previous and current environments. The differences between these environments are often depicted by what they sound like ‘in their head’ and ‘in their body’.  Given the fact that they are writing this paper for extra credit, students feel reinforced for listening to themselves and recognize that listening to one self was never taught and often also not even possible. 

A male student writes that when he listens to the sound of his voice, he immediately loses track of what he is saying or what he is supposed to say and, consequently, he experiences confusion. All he can think of when, because of this writing exercise, he feels his voice in his body, is a sense of anxiety about growing up. He describes the deepening of his voice as he got older as a dreadful fear for what was to come. However, while writing and talking with himself, he gets passed his anxiety aboutthe unknown and suddenly feels grounded in how he sounds, in the now. He discovers the possibility of talking with himself and says “the sound of my voice is me, nothing but me” and “there is no better feeling than talking to yourself.” 

He realizes, that other than talking in his head, he didn’t get to talk with himself that much. He notices “I am always performing a task while I am talking with himself in my head”, but now he gives himself permission not to do that. Instead, he talks about his favorite things, so that he doesn’t have to think about what he says so much. This is totally new for him. First it was strange “like a puzzle getting jumbled around my head”, but then he began to listen to and answer the questions he had for himself. He said “It then began to feel like a tool that can unlock any problem that man has.”

It is common for those who listen to their voice while they speak for the first time to initially have confusing or chaotic feelings about it. These are the messages that were given to us while we were growing up. Moreover, these effects occurred within the first few years of our nonverbal lives. They became the basis upon which we developed our verbal language skills. Many of us were overwhelmed by too much language too soon, involved in learning to perform tasks. Skinner recognized this instructional aspect as central to verbal behavior (1957) development. The failure to learn how to perform a nonverbal task correctly is more often than people are willing to admit a direct consequence of faulty verbal instruction. This is especially the case when, due to stress or frustration, different or contradicting messages are send by the verbalizer verbally and nonverbally.

The disorientation involved in the process of listening to our voice while we speak was less severe for the female student. It only brought up a sense of being overly self-conscious. However, for the male student there was a greater impact, which tells us about the lack of support he must have experienced as a child. More facts about our different behavioral histories become available with more interaction, that is, with more SVB. These facts cannot be communicated in Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB), in  which verbalizers aversively control the verbal behavior of the mediator. 

As babies we express ourselves without words. Until we learn how to speak, we are nonverbal verbalizers. As we were initially only capable of mediating the sounds that we grew up with, how we will sound later on, very much resembles the stimuli experienced in our earliest environment. A different situation determines a different experience of our sound and involves a change of our sound. When this different situation occurs, as when these students are writing this paper, they notice the difference.