Personality: The Psychological Behaviorism Theory 145classical conditioning procedure. The results of a series of ex-
periments have showed that a stimulus paired with positive or
negative emotional words acquires positive or negative emo-
tional properties. Social attitudes, as one example, are
emotional responses to people that can be manipulated by lan-
guage conditioning (Staats & Staats, 1958). To illustrate, in a
political campaign the attempt is made to pair one’s candidate
with positive emotional words and one’s opponent with nega-
tive emotional words. That is why the candidate with greater
financial backing can condition the audience more widely,
giving great advantage.
Skinner’s theory is that emotion (and classical condition-
ing) and behavior (and operant conditioning) are quite sepa-
rate, and it is the operant behavior that is what he considers
important. In contrast, PB’s basic learning-behavior theory
states that the two types of conditioning are intimately related
and that both are important to behavior. For one thing, a
stimulus is reinforcing because it elicits an emotional
response. Thus, as a stimulus comes to elicit an emotional re-
sponse through classical conditioning, it gains potential as a
reinforcing stimulus. My students and I have shown that
words eliciting a positive or negative emotional response will
function as a positive or negative reinforcer. In addition, the
PB learning-behavior theory has shown that a stimulus that
elicits a positive or negative emotional response will also
function as a positive or negative incentive and elicit approach
or avoidance behavior. That is a reason why emotional words
(language) guide people’s behavior so ubiquitously. An im-
portant concept from this work is that humans learn a very
large repertoire of emotion-eliciting words, the verbal-
emotional repertoire.Individual differences in this repertoire
widely affect individual differences in behavior (see Staats,
1996).
One other principle should be added for positive emo-
tional stimuli: They are subject to motivational (deprivation-
satiation) variations. For example, food is a stimulus that
elicits a positive emotional response on a biological basis;
however, the size of the response varies according to the
extent of food deprivation. That also holds for the reinforce-
ment and incentive effect of food stimuli on operant behavior.
These three effects occur with stimuli that elicit an emotional
response through biology (as with food) or through learning,
as with a food word.
The human being has an absolutely gargantuan capacity
for learning. And the human being has a hugely complex
learning experience. The result is that in addition to biologi-
cally determined emotional stimuli, the humanlearnsa gigan-
tic repertoire that consists of stimuli that elicit an emotional
response, whether positive or negative. There are many vari-
eties of stimuli—art, music, cinema, sports, recreations,
religious, political, manners, dress, and jewelry stimuli—that
are operative for humans. They elicit emotion on a learned
basis. As a consequence, they can also serve as motivational
stimuli and act as reinforcers and incentives. That leads to a
conclusion that individual differences in the quantity and type
of emotional stimuli will have great significance for personal-
ity and human behavior.Sensorimotor StudiesFollowing its human-centered learning approach, PB studied
sensorimotor repertoires in children. To illustrate, consider the
sensorimotor response of speech. Traditional developmental
norms state that a child generally says her first words at the
age of 1 year, but why there are great individual differences is
not explained, other than conjecturing that this depends on
biological maturation processes. In contrast, PB states that
speech responses are learned according to reinforcement prin-
ciples, but that reinforcement depends on prior classical con-
ditioning of positive emotion to speech sounds (Staats, 1968,
1996). I employed this theoretical analysis and learning pro-
cedures in accelerating the language development of my own
children, in naturalistic interactions spread over a period of
months, but adding up to little time expenditure. Their speech
development accelerated by three months, which is 25% of the
usual 12-month period (Staats, 1968). I have since validated
the learning procedures with parents of children with retarded
speech development. Lovaas (1977) has used this PB frame-
work. Psychological behaviorism also systematically studied
sensorimotor skills such as standing, walking, throwing and
catching a ball, using the toilet, writing letters, paying atten-
tion, counting objects, and so on in systematic experimental-
longitudinal research (see Staats, 1968, 1996).
In this theory of child development, PB pursued its goal of
unification with traditional psychology, in this case with the
field of child development. The PB position is that the norms
of traditional child developmentalists provide valuable
knowledge. But this developmental conception errs in assum-
ing biological determination and in ignoring learning. Prior to
my work, the reigning view was that it was wasteful or harm-
ful to attempt to train the child to develop behaviors early. For
example, the 4-year-old child was said to be developmentally
limited to an attention span of 5 min to 15 min and thus to be
incapable of formal learning. We showed that such preschool-
ers can attend well in the formal learning of reading skills for
40-min periods if their work behaviors are reinforced (Staats
et al., 1964). When not reinforced, however, they do not
attend. My later research showed that childrenlearn progres-
sivelyto attend and work well for longer periods by having
been reinforced for doing so.