Towards Understanding the Meaning of Affectionate Verbal Behavior; Towards Creating Romantic Loving

Here I outline answers to four questions: What are the possible meanings of various forms of affectionate verbal behavior including "I love X" and "I'm in love with X"? What contingencies might produce corresponding romantic love, in natural settings, between two particular persons? What resources are needed to put these contingencies into effect? What are some of the issues and concerns regarding implementing these contingencies? Key words: affectionate behavior, attachment, close relationships, dependency, interpretation, love, loving, romantic love, social behavior, verbal behavior. Behavior analysts, like other scientists, have extended their philosophy, principles, and methods from laboratory settings to settings where experimental control is impractical or phenomena are complex (Palmer, 1991, 2003; Palmer & Donahoe, 1991; Skinner, 1974, pp. 228-232). These inductive efforts are called interpretations. The many interpretations presented in Science and Human Behavior (Skinner, 1953) regarding, for example, "the self," emotions, intelligence, knowledge, and economic control have been followed by interpretations of, for example, language (Skinner, 1957); psychotherapy and depression (Dougher, 1994; Ferster, 1972, 1973; Kohlenberg & Tsai, 1991); grief (Brasted & Callahan, 1984); competition (Schmitt, 1986); memory (Palmer, 1991); vicarious learning (Masia & Chase, 1997); life, personhood, and dying (Fraley, 1998); religion (Gurein, 1998); and intimacy (Cordova & Scott, 2001). Here I interpret love, particularly romantic love. For four reasons, I suspect the interpretations reviewed here will enhance readers' ability to promote love. First, behavior analytic interpretations are down to earth. As you may already know, or will soon see, behavior analysts focus on real physical events rather than explanatory fictions such as motives, attitudes and even love, as commonly understood (see MacCorquodale & Meehl's [1948] discussion of hypothetical constructs). Second, we focus on relations between manipulable aspects of the environment and behavior rather than on correlations between various behavior-defined constructs. In other words, most of our empirical research utilizes experimental rather than correlational methods. Third, we seek to understand and control the behavior of individuals rather than aggregates. As you will see, understanding what characterizes "the aggregate person" is helpful but we need to know more if we are to understand how we can induce a particular person to fall in love. Finally, our approach has considerable success in producing large, important changes in the behavior of the individual organism (Meehl, 1978). One of our most notable, recent achievements has been helping autistic children acquire verbal and social behavior, one child at a time (e.g., Ghezzi, Williams, & Carr, 1999). Surely, some portion of our success is due to the terminology we have developed. I fear, however, that if I extensively use this terminology, I would limit my readership. So, I have minimized terminology, though readers who have studied an introductory behavior analytic text should be well prepared (e.g., Catania, 1998; Grant & Evans, 1994; Miltenberger, 2004; Sulzer-Azaroff & Mayer, 1991). There is one terminological issue, however, that we must face. Although I focus on "romantic love," I will often use the verb "loving" rather than the noun "love" because "love," as commonly used, suggests that within each of us resides an invisible, fictional "love goddess" that causes loving behavior (e.g., Hineline, 1980). People who so conceive love often speak of loving behavior indexing, reflecting, or being an expression of the status of this "love goddess." I, instead, as previously suggested, will avoid such explanatory fictions and focus on manipulable aspects of the world that may control loving behavior (Skinner, 1953, Chap. 10; Woodworth, 1924, pp. …