December 3, 2015

December 3, 2015

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Students,

This is my third response to “Epistemological Barriers to Radical Behaviorism” (O’Donohue et al., 1998). Skinner describes negative emotions: "We both strike and feel angry for a common reason, and that reason lies in the environment....Moreover [feelings] are immediately related to behavior, being collateral products of the same causes, and have therefore commanded more attention than the causes themselves, which are often rather remote" (Skinner, 1975,p.43). 

This statement has relevance for the extension of Radical Behaviorism with the Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB)/Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB) distinction. If we change the above statement into a positive emotion, we get: we love, care and support each other and feel happy, safe and hopeful “for a common reason and that reason lies in the environment.” 

Skinner describes NVB, but I describe SVB. Skinner describes negative feelings, which are “are immediately related to behavior”, which are “collateral products of the same causes, and have therefore commanded more attention than the causes themselves, which are often rather remote.” Since we all try to get rid of them, our negative feelings have commanded more attention from us than our positive feelings. 

In contrast to our negative emotions, whose causes of are “often rather remote,” as they are “collateral products of our genetic and environmental histories”, our positive emotions are always caused by variables in the immediate environments. If the speaker’s voice sounds nice, according to the listener, the listener is immediately affected. If, however, the speaker’s voice is perceived as an aversive stimulus, this will also immediately affect the listener, but this prevents any type of directness.

The NVB speaker speaks from a behavioral history of not being listened to, due to which only the listener-other-than-the-speaker was emphasized. This is why the NVB speaker only focuses on making others to listen to him or to her and why the listener who is conditioned by NVB speakers is trying very hard to only listen to others. In each case the attention of the speaker and the listener is focused on the other. The SVB speaker, on the other hand, speaks from a behavioral history of being listened too, which shaped and reinforced his or her behavior of the speaker-as-own-listener. Thus, in SVB the focus of both the speaker and the listener is on him or herself and because of that the SVB speaker is easier to listen to.