[2] The preceding behaviorisms of Ivan P. Pavlov, Edward L. Thorndike, John B. Watson, B. F. Skinner, and Clark L. Hull studied the basic principles of conditioning with animals.

Unlike Skinner's basic principles, emotion and classical conditioning are central causes of behavior.

The BBRs are both a dependent and an independent variable, as they result from learning and cause behavior, constituting the individual's personality.

According to Staats, the biological organism is the mechanism by which the environment produces learning that results in basic behavioral repertoires which constitute personality.

Introspection was subjective and variable, not a source of objective evidence, and the mind consisted of an inferred entity that could never be observed.

Skinner's radical behaviorism also has not established a systematic relationship to traditional psychology knowledge.

Staats, however, notes that food was used by Pavlov to elicit a positive emotional response in his classical conditioning and Thorndike Edward Thorndike used food as the reward (reinforcer) that strengthened a motor response in what came to be called operant conditioning, thus emotion-eliciting stimuli are also reinforcing stimuli.

[6] Watson, although the father of behaviorism, did not develop and research a basic theory of the principles of conditioning.

[16] Thus, (1) hearing that people of an ethnic group are dishonest will condition a negative emotion to the name of that group as well as to members of that group, (2) complimenting (saying positive emotional words to) a person for a performance will increase the likelihood the person will perform that action later on, and (3) seeing the sign RESTAURANT will elicit a positive emotion in a hungry driver and thus instigate turning into the restaurant's parking lot.

PB treats various aspects of language, from its original development in children to its role in intelligence and in abnormal behavior,[4][8][17] and backs this up with basic and applied study.

Staats began studies to analyze cases of important human behaviors in basic and applied ways in 1954.

When his daughter Jenny was born in 1960 he began to study and to produce her language, emotional, and sensory-motor development.

When she was a year and a half old he began teaching her number concepts, and then reading six months later, using his token reinforcer system, as he recorded on audiotape.

[25] Following that the second Staats YouTube video[26] records him beginning teaching his three-year-old son with the reading learning (and counting) method he developed in 1962 with his daughter.

This film also shows a graduate assistant working with a culturally deprived four-year-old learning reading and writing numbers and counting, participating voluntarily.

The Staats YouTube video number 3[27] has additional cases of these usually delayed children voluntarily learning much ahead of time these cognitive repertoires that prepare them for school.

This research, that included work with his own children from birth on, was the basis for Staats' books[1][5][6][8] specifying the importance of the parents' early training of the child in language and other cognitive repertoires.

These statistical studies should be joined with Staats' work with individual children that shows the specifics of the learning involved and how to best produce it.

[4][8][17] He deals with many aspects of child development, from babbling to walking to discipline and time-out, and he considers parents one of his audiences.

His position is that children are the young of the human species that has a body that can make an infinity of different behaviors.

The human species also has a nervous system and brain of 100 billion neurons that can learn in marvelous complexity.

Such phenomena have led to the concept of personality as some internal trait that is inherited that strongly determines individuals' characteristic ways of behaving.

Psychological behaviorism's theory of abnormal personality rejects the concept of mental illness.

Behavior disorders also involve not having learned basic repertoires that are needed in adjusting to life's demands.

[8][34][35] Human origin is generally explained by Darwin's natural selection;[36][37][38][39][40] However, while Darwin gathered imposing evidence showing the evolution of physical characteristics of species his view that behavioral characteristics (such as human intelligence) also evolved was pure assumption with no evidentiary support PB presents a different theory, that the cumulative learning of pre-human hominins drove human evolution.

That occurred because the members of the evolving hominin species were continually learning new language, emotion-motivation, and sensory-motor repertoires.

It was cumulative learning that consistently created the selection device for the members of those generations that had the larger brains and were the better learners.

Because they are disconnected, they do not build a related, simpler and more understandable conception and scientific endeavor as, for example, the biological sciences do.

[7] This philosophy of science of unification is at one with Staats' attempt to construct his unified psychological behaviorism.

Psychological behaviorism's works project new basic and applied science at its various theory levels.