Private Event and Internal Event

A major difficulty for psychology is that many behaviors are not possible to be observed directly. Think of the scene: the psychologist is in his office and the patient is silent. How can we know what’s going on? How can we know what the patient is feeling or thinking?

This problem was solved in behavioral psychology through the concept of the private event. A private event is one that takes place in the presence of a particular individual.

In this text, you will learn what is private event and internal event. In addition, you will learn how psychology can be useful for us to understand ourselves and the behavior of others. Do you know what psychology can do for you?

Most of the time, the private event is an internal event, so it is common for there to be confusion between the idea of ​​an internal event and a private event. The internal event is an event that is only available to the person himself (for example, a bodily sensation such as “butterflies in the stomach”), while the private event can even be external, for example, when we are alone and say something out loud. high.

If we can perceive what happens inside our body, reliably know our own internal events, we cannot directly know the internal events of other people. With this, the question arises: how is it possible to have access to the private events of others? How can we know about these events and better understand the behavior of others?

Perhaps the best way is to ask the other person what internal stimulus he is feeling. In the case of love relationships, we know the importance of dialogue in relationships.

For psychologists, what the patient says (and fails to say) is also extremely important. Therefore, we always ask the patient to report verbally about their experience.

The reason is simple, verbal reports of self-observation and self-description expose internal events. In simpler terms, when the person tells about their internal events (feelings, sensations, thoughts) they are opening up, exposing themselves – and with that, the psychologist can help.

But the verbal report, what the individual tells or says, will not replace the internal event itself. That is, the internal event is the internal event and the communication of the internal event is something else. The communication of the internal event, however, is always extremely important.

When we communicate, we speak and write in a certain language. Sometimes we forget this fact. This text is written in Portuguese, right? When we think of Portuguese, we are thinking “inside” a language, which has its history and particular form. For example, Portuguese is very different from Japanese and Arabic.

What I mean is that verbal behavior is a behavior that we learn in our life history. Just as we were born into a culture whose language is Portuguese, we could have been born into an Arab culture. The way we would express our internal events would be totally different.

Thus, verbal behavior is the result of long learning. How can we tell the difference between nostalgia and memory? Adrenaline and fear? Hope and anxiety?

Over time, we learn to distinguish between these words and the internal events they speak about. In technical terms, through a process of differential reinforcement we learn certain verbal responses (tacts) presented to internal stimuli.

What does this mean? Think of a child with a sad face. We are going to talk to her and ask her: – “Are you sad? Why are you with this sadness?”

The child will be learning that what he is feeling internally is sadness. It is sadness and not fear, it is sadness and not pain. This process is what we call differential reinforcement for the acquisition of verbal behavior.

In this way, verbal behavior is learned. Culture teaches children to speak about their own internal events. However, some people do not go through this process and end up not knowing exactly what they feel.

In these cases, psychology is also an instrument for the perception and understanding of internal events. As we get to know our own world, we can change it for our benefit.

When the patient does not know how to say what he feels, psychology also has other expressive techniques, such as drawings, body expressions, theater, art therapy, among others.

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