June 5, 2016

June 5, 2016

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Reader,

I received the latest edition of Operants, the online magazine of the B.F. Skinner Foundation. On the first page, the president, Julie Vargas, raises the question: what do you do if your usual procedures aren’t working?

Let’s face it, our spoken communication isn’t working. Behaviorism and behaviorology are not well-accepted and are most of the time not even part of the conversation. In spite of the empirical evidence people are not open to the facts about the science of human behavior. 

Those who are informed about behaviorism primarily talk among themselves. Actually, that is not true either, there is not enough real conversation going on. There is an almost sectarian quality to those few who are familiar with the workings of operant conditioning. 

Sadly, even behaviorists or behaviorologists have mainly Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB) instead of Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB) among themselves and with others. This distinction matters as it depicts the difference between unscientific and scientific ways of talking.

Only in writing have behaviorists and behaviorologists adhered to their science, but not in their speaking. Julie Vargas, who answers her own question and writes a president’s column, brings her private speech into her public speech. Interestingly, by writing about it, she describes what needs to happen to make SVB possible. 

In NVB our private speech is excluded from our public speech. Thus, behaviorists and behaviorologists are just as stuck as everybody else with the false notion of a behavior-causing self. Once behaviorists and behaviorologists explore the SVB/NVB distinction, they will have to admit to this crucially important fact.

Unless we change the way we talk, we cannot extinguish our pre-scientific inner self. As even behaviorists haven’t changed their own way of talking, they weren’t able to change other people their way of talking. Only to the extent that they were able to change their own way of talking were they capable and have they been capable of changing other people their way of talking.

June 4, 2016

June 4, 2016

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Reader,

After I read some of my writing to a colleague, he made a remark which affected me. I had explained some of the clinical aspects of the Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB) /Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB) distinction to him and I had described to him the relationship between NVB public speech and negative self-talk. 

If our verbal community speaks French, we will learn to speak French and our private speech will also be in French (and not in Russian). Likewise, a person’s private speech is mainly SVB or NVB due to the kind of speech they are exposed to. We behave these two universal response classes only to the extent that we have been exposed to them. 

NVB is the kind of speech in which there is and remains a separation between the speaker and the listener. This separation gets wider and more problematic over time. However, during SVB, there is no separation at all, but there is oneness between the speaker and the listener. Also, in SVB each speaker is his or her own listener. 

During NVB, we tend to consider our private speech, what we think ourselves, as something which is separate from our public speech. During SVB, however, oneness is felt by the speaker and by the listener who is not the speaker as well as by the speaker and by the listener who is the speaker. 

My colleague commented that in behaviorism there is no difference between the behavior which occurs inside or outside the skin. His words confirmed what I have been saying for years and made me realize it is only due to our way of talking that there appears to be a difference between public and private speech. 

The difference we make between private and public speech is maintained by NVB and is dissolved by SVB. Actually, nothing is really dissolved as the difference between  private and public speech never existed in the first place; dissolvement is imaginary. 

My colleague pointed out that the distinction between SVB and NVB appears to be the same as behaviorism’s distinction between behavior that is caused by variables in the environment (inside as well as outside our skin) and mentalism, which assumes an inner self to be causing our behavior. The negative self-talk associated with mental health problems is the natural outcome of our exposure to NVB public speech. 

June 3, 2016

June 3, 2016

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Reader,

In addition to being a psychology instructor, I also work as a therapist with clients who have mental health problems. It is clear that my main job is to provide instructional verbal stimuli. I am teaching my clients new behavior, a new way of responding. They tell me their story, in which case I respond to and validate their response to what has happened. Another task is to point out consequences of their actions and to let them respond to my restating of what they have told me. 

We explore together the function of their behavior and we talk about the stimulus, response and consequence, the three-term contingency. ‘Symptoms’ are consequences of behaviors. Depression is a consequence of how they talk with themselves. Negative self-talk, is maintained by the environment in which there are few reinforcing and mainly punishing stimuli. Such environments need to be avoided for depression to be decreased. 

Other environments, such as the one that I create, provide positive reinforcement, which restructures the client’s private speech. I waste no time in on trying to reduce a client’s negative self-talk as I know it to be part of negative public speech. In other words, Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB) public speech, that is, NVB which occurs outside of the skin and Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB) private speech, that is NVB which occurs inside of the skin, always happen together. 

Thus, ‘symptoms’, such as mania (Bipolar Disorder), inability to focus (ADHD) or psychosis (Schizophrenia), are explained and treated as private verbal behaviors, which originate in and are traced back to our public speech which reinforces them. However, negative public speech doesn’t cause a client's negative private speech, but is part of it. Also, NVB covert speech doesn’t cause NVB overt speech as the two are always a function of the same aversive, hostile, threatening environment.  The therapeutic situation that is created by my SVB reliably decreases the client’s symptoms and increases and validates his or her already successful behaviors. 

June 2, 2016

June 2, 2016

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Reader,

Once it has been pointed out to you and once you have experimented a little bit with it and once you have taken some steps to explore and verify it, the distinction between Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB) and Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB) becomes increasingly more apparent to you. You will have to pay more attention to how you sound while you speak in order to be able to determine what constitutes SVB and NVB for you. 

You can have SVB all by yourself and you will feel completely at ease with yourself when you achieve it. During NVB, however, you will only experience negative emotions. You discover that the speaker who has SVB is not trying to make the listener feel this or that way. The SVB speaker is neither intimidating the listener, nor is he or she trying to make the listener feel good.

The SVB speaker is not emotionally manipulating the listener. In NVB, on the other hand, the speaker is yanking the listener around. He or she is trying to butter you up and placate you or trying to threaten, overwhelm or distract you. When you are by yourself and explore your self-listening, you can hear if you are trying to make yourself feel a particular way or not. It is like finding your favorite station on the radio; you keep changing the dial until you have found it. 

Once you have stopped trying to make yourself feel a particular way, you will have SVB. It is effortless, relaxing and comforting and you will know when you have it. As long as you feel uncertain about whether you have it or not, you are not having it. Under such circumstances you produce NVB and your voice expresses anxiety, stress or frustration. You can hear when you sound pretentious, defensive, emphatic, confused, lost or angry. When you listen to how you sound, you hear that you sound negative and once your assessment is accurate, you notice an immediate shift in how you sound. You will produce SVB once accept your NVB. 

June 1, 2016

June 1, 2016

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Reader,

Following Skinner’s example, behaviorists differentiate between rule-governed and contingency-controlled behavior. To the reader who read some of my writings, it should be clear that Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB) is rule-governed behavior whereas Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB) maps onto contingency-controlled behavior. 

The verbal discriminative stimuli which specify the contingency for NVB keep us in our place of the social hierarchy. Breaking the rules has immediate punitive consequences, such as social disqualification. Not accidentally, verbal behavior governed by rules is insensitive to the contingency in which it occurs. 

Stated differently, rule-governed behavior requires us to be on automatic pilot; we stop for the red traffic light and we get moving on green. Our rule-governed behavior is not as effective in talking as it is in traffic situations. Preconceived notions about how we should talk dampen and limit our conversations. 

The NVB speaker, whose speech is governed by rules, isn’t and can’t be present in the moment. Moreover, preconceived talking prevents both the speaker and the listener from being alive. Consequently, in NVB there is hardly any turn-taking and the speaker and the listener remain separate, that is, their speaking and listening behavior cannot harmonize. 

In NVB the speaker is simply not open to the listener, who is not considered to be important as a speaker by the speaker. The speaker’s SVB, on the other hand, is under direct control of its consequences, which are mediated by the listener. The SVB speaker stimulates the listener to become a SVB speaker. 

As the speaker and the listener take turns during SVB, they mutually reinforce each other. My insistence on the SVB/NVB distinction, which always increases SVB and decreases NVB, came about because of my analysis of contingencies which others have not yet fully explored. 

My ability to create an environment in which SVB can occur and can continue, which is based on my skill to evoke experimentation in my students and clients who experience and acknowledge SVB’s beneficial effects, was based on a hunch I had, which proved to be correct.

Initially, I didn’t and couldn’t even believe it myself. I felt so energized and positive about the sound of my own voice while I spoke that I contemplated what would happen if I could continue to speak with that sound and if others would be able to do the same? 

Talking while listening to myself with others, who also listen to themselves while they speak, turned out to be much more complicated than talking out loud by myself. As it was much easier to do, I ended up talking with myself many times. Each time I did that I effortlessly synchronized my speaking and listening behavior again.

Due to the NVB public speech I had been exposed to and was conditioned by while growing up, I experienced a lot of NVB private speech. When I started listening to myself I had no idea about behaviorism and about the fact that my behavior was caused by my environment.

While listening to myself again and again I noticed that there occurred a separation between me as speaker and me as listener. It was only when I learned about radical behaviorism that I realized it was about the different rates of my speaking and listening behavior. 

The rift between our speaking and listening behavior is always preceded by the separation created by a speaker and the listener who is not that speaker in NVB. During SVB, even if it mostly only occurred by myself, my speaking and listening behavior became joined again. 

By listening to myself I regained a sense of wholeness and I experienced the reunification of my speaking and listening behavior. I was able to stop my mechanical rule-governed behavior and explored the contingency which allowed me to feel alive and conscious again. 

In addition to self-experimentation, I explained as often as possible to others the link between voice, the vocal discriminative stimulus and our way of talking. I created the contingency for novel, exciting, effective verbal behavior. From a wealth of positive experiences my understanding of the SVB/NVB distinction emerged. 

It was clear from the beginning that I was only able to explain how SVB worked to those who were willing to experiment and verify with me. Guided by my experience and by the feedback from others, to my own amazement I discovered the objective reality of what I was doing. 

The development of my contingency-based logic, which is, of course, entirely different from rule-governed logic, began some thirty years ago and was validated by those who experimented with me. By now also various behaviorists have found for themselves how SVB works!