148 A Psychological Behaviorism Theory of Personality
certain tactile stimuli, warm stimulation when cold, and vice
versa, and a negative emotional response to aversive, harmful
stimuli of various kinds. Conditioning occurs when any neu-
tral stimulus is paired with one of those biological stimuli and
comes to elicit the same type of emotional response. Condi-
tioning occurs also when a neutral stimulus is paired with an
emotion-eliciting stimulus (e.g., an emotional word) that has
gained this property through learning. The human has a long
life full of highly variable, complex experiences and learns an
exceedingly complex emotional-motivational repertoire that
is an important part of personality. People very widely have
different emotional learning. Not everyone experiences posi-
tive emotional responses paired with religious stimuli, foot-
ball-related stimuli, or sex-related stimuli. And different
conditioning experiences will produce different emotional-
motivational repertoires. Because human experience is so
variegated, with huge differences, everyone’s hugely complex
emotional-motivational personality characteristics are unique
and different.
That means, of course, that people find different things
reinforcing. What is a reward for one will be a punishment for
someone else. Therefore, people placed in the same situation,
with the same reinforcer setup, will learn different things.
Consider a teacher who compliments two children for work-
ing hard. For one child the compliment is a positive reinforcer,
but for the other child it is aversive. With the same treatment
one child will learn to work hard as a consequence, whereas
the other will work less hard. That is also true with respect to
incentives. If one pupil has a positive emotional response to
academic awards and another pupil does not, then the initia-
tion of an award for number of books read in one semester will
elicit strong reading behavior in the one but not in the other.
What is reinforcing for people and what has an incentive ef-
fect for them strongly affects how they will behave. That is
why the emotional BBR is an important personality cause of
behavior.
The Language-Cognitive Aspects of Personality
Each human normally learns a huge and fantastically com-
plex language repertoire that reflects the hugely complex
experience each human has. There is commonality in that ex-
perience across individuals, which is why we speak the same
language and can communicate. But there are gigantic indi-
vidual differences as well (although research on language
does not deal with those). Those differences play a central
role in the individual differences we consider in the fields of
personality and personality measurement.
To illustrate, let us take intelligence as an aspect of per-
sonality. In PB theory intelligence is composed of basic
behavioral repertoires, largely of a language-cognitive nature
but including important sensorimotor elements also. People
differ in intelligence not because of some biological quality,
but because of the basic behavioral repertoires that they have
learned. We can see what is specifically involved at the
younger age levels, where the repertoires are relatively simple.
Most items, for example, measure the child’s verbal-motor
repertoire, as in following instructions. Some items specifi-
cally test that repertoire, as do the items on the Stanford-Binet
(Terman & Merrill, 1937, p. 77) that instruct the child to “Give
me the kitty [from a group of small objects]” and to “Put the
spoon in the cup.” Such items, which advance in complexity
by age, also test the child’s verbal-labeling repertoire. The
child can only follow instructions and be “intelligent” if he or
she has learned the names of the things involved.
The language-cognitive repertoires also constitute other as-
pects of personality, for they are important on tests of language
ability, cognitive ability, cognitive styles, readiness, learning
aptitude, conceptual ability, verbal reasoning, scholastic apti-
tude, and academic achievement tests. The tests, considered to
measure different facets of personality, actually measure char-
acteristics of the language-cognitive BBR. The self-concept
also heavily involves the verbal-labeling repertoire, that is, the
labels learned to the individual’s own physical and behavioral
stimuli. People differ in the labels they learn and in the emo-
tional responses elicited by those verbal labels. We can exem-
plify this using an item on the MMPI (Dahlstrom & Welsh,
1960, p. 57): “I have several times given up doing a thing be-
cause I thought too little of my ability.” Individuals who have
had different experience with themselves will have learned
different labels to themselves (as complex stimuli) and will
answer the item differently. The self-concept (composed of
learned words) is an important aspect of personality because
the individual reasons, plans, and decidesdepending on those
words.So the learned self-concept plays the role of a cause of
behavior. As another example, the “suspiciousness” of para-
noid personality disorder heavily involves the learned verbal-
labeling repertoire. This type of person labels the behaviors of
others negatively in an atypical way. The problem is that the
unrealistic labeling affects the person’s reasoning and behav-
ior in ways that are not adjustive either for the individual or
for others.
These examples indicate that what are traditionally con-
sidered to be parts of personality are conceived of in PB as
parts of the learned language-cognitive BBR.The Sensorimotor Aspects of PersonalityTraditionally, the individual’s behavior is not considered
as a part of personality. Behavior is unimportant for the