March 2, 2015

March 2, 2015

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Behavioral Engineer

Dear Reader, 

 

Sound and Noxious Verbal Behavior are two subsets of vocal verbal behavior. During Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB), the listener becomes the speaker and the roles between speaker and listener alternate. Since the speaker doesn’t own the contingency, there is no aversive control in SVB. During Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB), on the other hand, the listener never, seldom or only minimally becomes the speaker, who aversively controls the behavior of the listener. 

SVB and NVB refer to episodes and are measured as a proportion of positive and aversive exchanges within each episode. In the analysis of vocal verbal behavior most attention has historically been given to the speaker, as the stimuli of the speaker effect the behavior of the listener in more or less the same way than any other nonverbal stimulation, such as gesturing. However, the SVB/NVB distinction points out this similarity is only occurring in SVB, but not in NVB. Only during SVB is the speaker’s behavior verbal and the listener’s behavior mostly nonverbal, because, although the listener in SVB responds to the speaker's verbal behavior, he or she is not forced to be verbal as would be the case in NVB.  

In SVB the listener doesn’t make any effort to listen to or understand the speaker. In NVB, by contrast, the listener strains him or herself to listen to and focus on what the speaker is saying. Moreover, in NVB the listener is primarily verbal or verbally fixated as there is a mismatch between his or her negative private speech and the aversive public speech. Since it is the listener as a body who mediates the speaker, NVB has very different physiological conditioning consequences. NVB affects the contingency, that is, the neural behavior within our own skin, such that the listener  becomes more likely not to speak and is coerced into only listening behavior and such that it only makes the speaker speak, but not listen.