July 29, 2016

July 29, 2016 

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Behavioral Engineer

Dear Reader, 

Here is my response to “Methodological problems in the analysis of behavior controlled by private events; some unusual recommendations” by Willard Day (1971). I consider Day to be a great behaviorist as what he says has a unique flavor and can be used to support my thesis of Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB). Day recognizes that much, if not most, of what he writes is under the control of private events. 

His writings were published by Sam Leigland in “Radical Behaviorism: Willard Day on Psychology and Philosophy” (1992). It is  no coincidence that Leigland was one of the few behaviorists who had encouraged me and had given me positive feedback when I emailed him a couple of years ago. It took a pleasant person like Leigland to produce this book.

After it recedes to a private level over the course of our development, most verbal behavior comes under control of events beneath our own skin. “Feelings can exercise a discriminative controlling relation with behavior as when the pains of a headache can set the occasion for my saying to someone, “I have a headache”, or can lead me to get a bottle of aspirin. “Feelings can also enter into contingencies as the consequent or reinforcing term, as when the reduction of the pains of a headache reinforces the behavior of taking aspirin.” 

Likewise, mediators (listeners) may experience feelings of support and relaxation with one verbalizer (speaker), but may notice fear or stress with another. We say (or don’t say), we like or dislike a person based on the private feelings this person elicits in us. The mediator’s wellbeing in the presence of the verbalizer sets the stage for a different kind of conversation than feelings of anxiety or frustration. In the former, private events enter into controlling the contingencies for SVB, but in the latter, private events enter into the controlling contingencies that maintain Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB). 

Day talks about “three classes of private events”: 1) “feelings”, 2) “covert talking” and 3) “Images”, but I think that two classes of private events are sufficient. Obviously, anyone who is continuously involved in and exposed to NVB overt (public) speech is likely to acquire NVB covert feelings, speech and images. Similarly, if we grow up with a lot of SVB, we are more likely to have SVB covert feelings, private speech and images. Private events are always related to public events.

“Covert talking can also serve the function of reinforcement.” The opposite can also be true, that is, covert talking can also serve the function of punishment (negative self-talk). We are all exposed to a mix of SVB and NVB and the extent to which we have been conditioned by one or the other determines the quality of our private events. Discrepancy between our private and our public events necessarily result into communication problems, conflicts and psychopathology. 

The importance of verbal behavior in “its capacity to be reinforced by its effects upon the speaker himself” becomes very clear during SVB, in which the speaker listens to him or herself while he or she speaks. The speaker-as-own-listener plays a central role in a person’s mental health. My client’s mental health problems improve as I skillfully and continuously stimulate and shape their behavior of the speaker-as-own-listener. This is a therapist’s most important job. If what is known as ‘mental illness’ is treated as verbal behavior, recovery is more likely.

Leigland quotes Skinner, who in About Behaviorism (1974) points out that verbal behavior is a class of behavior. “It has a special character only because it is reinforced by its effects on other people – at first other people, but eventually the speaker himself. As a result, it is free of spatial, temporal, and mechanical relations, which prevail between operant behavior and nonsocial consequences...[An] important consequence is that the speaker also becomes a listener and may richly reinforce his own behavior” (pp.88-90). Skinner here describes SVB. 

In NVB the speaker doesn’t and can’t become a listener to his own sound and is even prevented from it and therefore cannot “richly reinforce his own behavior.” Only to the extent that he or she was and is stimulated by another speaker to listen to him or herself while he or she speaks, will the speaker’s private speech be able to “richly reinforce his own behavior.” That is precisely what happens during SVB. 

Day describes participating in a meditation workshop that facilitated the emergence of images. It is quite likely that the voice of the meditation leader didn’t sound aversive. Most probably he or she sounded pretty calm and peaceful. Day writes “Yet it was perfectly apparent to me that the having of images functioned in a very straightforward fashion much as any other reinforcer in providing differential reinforcement which enabled me to shape up satisfactory covert moves in “altering my consciousness,” as they say, so that the rate of emission of symbolically significant images was increased.” 

If the sound of the voice of the meditation leader had made Day feel uncomfortable, irritated or frightened, he wouldn’t have been able to have this positive experience. Private events were not written off as a matter of “speculation” by Day. He wrote “I have said earlier in these remarks that the talking I would be doing would be obviously under the control of private events in some sense.” Sadly, most behaviorists have been very reluctant to theorize about verbal behavior and private events, but Day was clearly ahead of his time. He wrote “We are not in a professional situation at this time to say precisely what that sense is, yet the control is clearly in a certain degree different from the immediate environmental control exercised over the verbal descriptions we make in reporting direct observations.”

I interpret the above as Day’s acknowledgment that sometimes he simply didn’t want to hear what the speaker was saying and at other times, just the sound of the speaker’s voice would peak his interest. Any sensitive human being agrees with Day, who asserts “It is a mistake to regard anything which is not the report of direct observation or the experimental test of an hypothesis as simply speculation, with respect to which something further must be done.” 

The degree to which the speakers are sensitive to the listeners is determined by the extent to which they were conditioned by SVB or NVB. With the SVB/NVB distinction we can get a more accurate sense to what extent our verbal behavior is under control of our private events or of the immediate environment. 

As we acknowledge the direct affect-inducing effects of the speaker’s voice, we realize that neural behavior responses in the form of covert speech are, of course, accumulative effects of our behavioral history. Thus, our relative preference for SVB or NVB determines how we perceive our immediate environments. Our ears are conditioned to hear certain sounds and not to listen to others. To the extent that we prefer NVB, we are, to our own detriment, deaf for the sound of our own relaxation and wellbeing and to the extent that we prefer SVB, we don’t want to listen to NVB speakers and try to avoid listening to them.

My examples of SVB and NVB are also “not all that different from what Skinner calls simple tacts, and they would not seem all that different from the sorts of things that must be going on at many places in Skinner’s book Verbal Behavior, where countless illustrations of the kinds of things he is talking about are given.” Everyone can tell the difference between when a speaker speaks with or at the listener; the former is SVB, the latter is NVB. Moreover, it is quite obvious that these response classes occur, albeit at various rates, in every culture. 

Daytacts the antecedent controlling stimulation of the examples he is giving and explains that they “consisted of private events both verbal and nonverbal which occurred [to him] under the pseudo-audience setting situations involved in constructing [his] paper.” He introduces the word “pseudo-audience control” as “it refers to a category or class of antecedent controlling relations which is now a part of [his] behavioral repertoire to be able to discriminate, or to respond differentially to, and yet which is not set apart as a special subset of antecedent controlling relations in Skinner’s book Verbal Behavior.” 

Day statement ties right in with SVB: “We can bring to the analysis of behavior-controlling contingencies only the behavioral equipment for discriminatory responding that we have.” It takes someone like Day, who participated in a meditation workshop, to acknowledge this important fact. During SVB there is no aversive stimulation and thus the speaker and the listener become more and more at ease with themselves and with each other while they take turns to speak.

The speaker’s and listener’s shared ability to enjoy and maintain SVB makes them aware of the antecedent controlling relations that makes this conscious communication possible. NVB, by contrast, is mechanical. Only when communicators engage in SVB they recognize antecedent controlling relations that give rise to NVB. Our ability to discriminate is enhanced by SVB or it is impaired or made impossible by our NVB. 

A more refined functional analysis of the control of verbal behavior has always depended on the behaviorist’s ability to increase his or her SVB and decrease his or her NVB. That is, the SVB/NVB distinction transforms ordinary conversation into discrimination training. As we prolong our SVB and realize what we are capable of because of this way of interacting, we are grateful to those who have showed us the way. 

“What I am calling for is explicit and systematic effort on the part of the professional community to increase the refinement, sophistication, and subtlety of our capacities for discriminative responding that we can bring to bear on our assessment, or specification, of the variables involved in behavioral control. Clearly this effort should be empirically oriented. Yet the aim of this research should be conceptualized as precisely and explicitly nothing more than discrimination training.” 

Day indicates the possibility of SVB. However, like Skinner, he was unaware about the SVB/NVB distinction. That is why he still refers to “a group analysis” in which “individual members would undoubtedly find themselves defending, explaining and otherwise clarifying the nature of the stimulus control over their discriminations.” Once we have SVB, we stop “defending, explaining and clarifying.”  When we have SVB, we realize we only do those things controlled by aversive circumstances.

In SVB our verbal interaction will “have the effect of altering in productive ways the earlier discriminations that were reported by individual members.” SVB produces confidence to detect and verbalize the sound which controls our verbal behavior. “The verbal interaction among the members of the group should help” us to sound good. 

“In view of the crudity of the discriminations which any member of the profession is likely to have,” we need to stimulate and maintain SVB and reinforce each other! “The kind of distinctions which will be reported to the group is likely to appear more as a variety of categories or classes of verbal material which one somehow discriminates as differing in control, even though there will be little capacity to verbalize with much confidence the nature of that control.” In SVB we will have everything we need to be able to “verbalize with much confidence the nature of control.” We are surprised that we agree as we realize that our previous way of talking prevented it.