July 4, 2016

July 4, 2016 

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Behavioral Engineer

Dear Reader, 

This is my nineteenth response to “Epistemological Barriers to Radical Behaviorism” by Donohue et al. (1998). What do the authors mean when they write that “cognitive psychology does not require the student to fundamentally challenge his or her original beliefs regarding the causal status of mental events?” Students of cognitive psychology don’t have Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB), the kind of conversation in which it can be explored and verified that behavior is not caused by mental events.

Like other behaviors, mental events too are caused by environmental variables. There is no need to “fundamentally challenge” the student’s “original beliefs regarding the causal status of mental events.” What is needed is to stop Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB), the interaction in which the speaker challenges and thus aversively affects the listener.

In Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB) we get clear on the fact that behavior is a function of the environment. In other words, behavior is a function of other communicators, who are our environment during our spoken communication. That “cognitive psychology presents no barriers to” folk psychology is beside the point. The real issue is that NVB has never been viewed as the mechanism which is maintaining “this framework.”

According to the SVB/NVB distinction “the key process” we must focus on is not information processing, but spoken communication, which occurs not inside, but outside of the organism. There is no difference between our private and our public speech as to how they are caused. What cognitivists call “human intelligence” is merely verbal behavior, which occurs only under the circumstances in which it can occur. 

It is a sad thing we still believe that intelligence originates inside a person as this prevents us from experiencing the conversation and relationship of which it is a function. Of course, intelligence, as part of our verbal behavior, is a social construct and we need to have SVB to verify this.  In SVB the speaker speaks and the listener speaks with the speaker.

July 3, 2016

July 3, 2016 

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Behavioral Engineer

Dear Reader, 

This is my eighteenth response to “Epistemological Barriers to Radical Behaviorism” by Donohue et al. (1998). I had a beautiful dream of a large family of various generations that was with me as they were all learning about Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB). We were slowly walking and talking through a park and when I spoke everyone stood still.

It was such an enjoyable event; small children were running around, grandparents were talking with their sons and daughters and bigger children were talking and laughing among themselves. Some parents pushed a baby carriage, held the hand of a toddler or carried their child on their shoulders. Each age group had their own conversations and as we walked and talked, the children were ahead and around us.

Before me walked teenagers and middle agers and behind me were the elders, who were going a bit more slowly. It didn’t matter that we were not covering much distance as there was time to meet and talk. During our walk the different generations got to meet and greet each other.

The dream stands in stark contrast with the cognitive psychologists, who still continue to think and teach that “people largely control their own destinies by believing in and acting on the values and beliefs that they hold” (Ellis & Grieger, 1977). Presumably, they “abstract information about their world, construct their experience of their world and synthesize this information into cognitive structures that direct behavior.”

In the area of psychopathology the dull cognitivists insist that “defective schemata” are “responsible for a variety of behavioral disorders, such as depression, mania, panic disorder and phobias” ( Beck & Weishaar, 1989; Craske & Barlow, 1993; Young, Beck & Weinberger, 1993). 

As a therapist, I have not met any mental health client who was helped by this cognitive view. To the contrary, I have consistently heard stories about how detrimental such treatment has been. Making the individual responsible for his or her own behavior is similar to blaming the victim. 

July 2, 2016

July 2, 2016 

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Behavioral Engineer

Dear Reader, 

This is my seventeenth response to “Epistemological Barriers to Radical Behaviorism” by Donohue et al. (1998). The authors argue that many people have used and have witnessed other people use” folk psychology “to account for human behavior for the first 20 years or so of their lives.” However, what people have been involved in and exposed to, was a way of talking which, according to them, accounts for their behavior.

During Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB) speakers justify and rationalize why they talk the way they do. Parents practicing coercive behavioral control may say to their children “I do this for your own good.” Along with the inevitable counter-control which results from such parenting  NVB continues to increase in response rate. When “during these formative years they also have witnessed very little challenge to these accounts” this simply means that their NVB was never challenged.

Those who know about the distinction between Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB) and NVB understand that challenging NVB never worked and only gave rise to more NVB. The contrast between SVB and NVB was never presented. Only from this contrast more SVB can be stimulated. By comparing one to the other we can and will all agree that SVB is better than NVB and that we should try to increase SVB and decrease NVB.

Once the distinction is clear, discrimination learning will effortlessly increase our rate of SVB. This is another criterion which has not been recognized: NVB is effortful and SVB is effortless. What should be made emphatically clear is that “most individuals who pursue formal education in the behavioral sciences begin” unknowingly with NVB. 

“Real education” from “folk psychology” to behavioral science never happened, as our challenge has always been to go from NVB to SVB. This also didn’t happen, but it would happen once behaviorists realized the importance of this distinction. “The more systematic and formal positions that the student encounters in the academy” require SVB.

July 1, 2016

July 1, 2016 

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Behavioral Engineer

Dear Reader, 

This is my sixteenth response to “Epistemological Barriers to Radical Behaviorism” by Donohue et al. (1998). Those who believe in folk psychology insist “that scientific research is best accomplished by group experimental designs.” The research which consists of “large groups of subjects” deals with averages, which doesn’t tell us anything about the individual. Behavioral science would have been more popular if more behaviorists would have chosen to apply science to changing the behavior of those who are suffering from mental health issues. 

Behaviorists with clinical experience make much more sense and are easier to be understood.  I am such a behaviorist. Sadly, for the most part, radical behaviorism isn’t practiced in the mental health field. What is practiced is a watered down version of radical behaviorism called cognitive behaviorism. The “Epistemological Barriers to Radical Behaviorism” are the same as the so-called cognitive distortions that cognitive behaviorists want their mental health clients to believe in.

To the radical behaviorist a person’s private speech has no causal status. Although private speech as well as public speech are both caused by environmental variables, what a person ends up saying or thinking to him or herself, his or her private speech, is mediated by the neural behavior of his or her body, which was conditioned by the extent to which it was exposed to circumstances in which there was Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB) or Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB). 

The manic behavior of a person with Bipolar Disorder goes hand in hand with negative self-talk and is indicative of a history of mainly NVB, which always occurred in abusive, hostile and chaotic environments. When one treats clients with such histories and hears these histories over and over again, one realizes that the path to recovery must consist of learning to prevent the environments which have caused the client's problems.