December 22, 2015

December 22, 2015

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Students,

This is my sixth response to “The Personal Life of the Behavioral Analyst” by D. Bostow (2011). Based on my own self-experimentation, I can tell you with certainty and pride that your problem behaviors will decrease and eventually stop, once you have an accurate understanding of how you talk. As my understanding about Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB) and Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB) evolved, my life became easier, more successful and more enjoyable. This couldn’t occur as long my NVB was happening at a higher rate than my SVB. As your ability to discriminate SVB and NVB improves, you will find that rates of SVB are increasing and rates of SVB are decreasing. 

If my prediction doesn’t come out as I explain, you must be mistaking NVB for SVB or SVB for NVB. We mistake NVB for SVB and vice versa as we have all been conditioned by NVB. NVB keeps us busy with others and not with ourselves. You, my dear reader, are more inclined to experiment on others than on yourself. Self-experimentation and its benefits are underestimated, but the benefits of experimentation on others is overrated and continuously sold on us. 

Just as labelling of foods provides us with the discriminative stimulus that prompts healthier food choices, we need to have a term for the kind of interaction that occurs when a speaker affects a listener in a negative manner. When that happens the speaker creates NVB. Like unhealthy food, NVB must be identified and avoided. Similarly, SVB needs to be reinforced, validated, experienced and understood. Since we don’t label SVB as SVB or NVB as NVB, SVB isn’t experienced and understood as such. To the contrary, we keep reinforcing and validating NVB. 

As more and more people have become obese, our rates of NVB have been increasing. Meanwhile NVB keeps causing all our relationship problems. Certainly, “The field is ripe for inventive behavior-analytic research, research that comes with the tighter scrutiny of direct observation of targeted behavior rather than questionnaires.” However, this “tighter scrutiny of direct observation” should involve listening while we speak. Unless we can hear our own sound, we will not be able to identify SVB. We haven’t identified SVB because we have never really listened to ourselves while we speak. If we did, we would find out that our sound has a different effect on us than it usually has. In NVB, we are unaware of our own sound, but in SVB we enjoy our relaxed tone of voice.