April 13, 2016

April 13, 2016

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Reader,

In “Religion as Schedule-Induced Behavior” (2009) Strand writes that “this experience [a monumental life event] is evoked rather than emitted, although it serves as the basic unit for emitted behaviors” [words added by this writer]. In other words, a life-threatening event, the foxhole experience, evokes respondent as well as operant behavior. As I have already explained in my previous writings, effortful and effortless behavior cannot occur esimultaneously; they always occur sequentially. Likewise, Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB) and Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB) as well as graceful and acquired religious behavior also occur successively. 

Strand thinks that “foundational religious experiences” may be “more complex than simply responding to the frame of self-as-infinite.” He quotes Ainslie (2001) who found that “concurrent schedules may give rise to attentional switching, which is the basis for a variety of experiential-behavioral phenomena including compulsions, addictions, psycho-genic itches and pains.” In my analysis, mental health issues, political grandiosity, as well as effortful religion are all labeled as being a function of NVB. 

This is where Strand’s analysis and the SVB/NVB distinction overlap, as it highlights that behavioral phenomena may be defined in terms of the patterning of responding that occurs across multiple schedules.” I think the patterning of responding is explained very well by SVB and NVB. However, we must account for how this “attentional switching” comes about. When an elicited escape response is ineffective, because it doesn’t change the foxhole situation, then, regardless of attentional switchinging, there will be an involuntary immobilization response, a freeze response and dissociation.

The veteran, who acquires PTSD under inescapable aversive circumstances, is plagued by hypervigilance, hyper-arousal and sleep problems. If, on the other hand, “attentional switching” comes about due to positive, supportive, happy circumstances, its quality is of a completely different order. During SVB we calmly investigate whatever is in our attention, but not during NVB.