Behaviorist Bias in Neuroscience ?

[OtakuNutchi]

As a brief mention of context; I'm reading a book on the recent field of affective neuroscience (The Archeology of Mind, Jaak Panksepp 2012).

A tangent topic discussed in this book is that of radical behaviorism. The author states, in the second chapter, the influence on 20th century neuroscience provided by the behaviorist approach, especially the overshadowing of "affects" (sub-cortical precedents of emotional feelings) in the mammalian brain.
Take this quote from the book as an example:

They thought that all behavior was learned on the basis of psychologically undefinable aspects of rewards and punishments. They explicitly chose to ignore the likelihood that affective changes in the brain gave rewarding and punishing events the power to control behavior.

...It's as if behaviorism took the scientific criteria of testability to its extreme and ignored aspects that were difficult to test, rather than attempt to understand them. Instead of investigating the brain, they studied the outputs of a "black box".
I'm not sure whether this interpretation of behaviorism is accurate (i'm not a neuroscientist), but i get the impression that it has slowed down neuroscientific research, especially regarding the understanding of emotions.

Here's another quote from the book, which i found interesting:

We hope the present book will change and expose behaviorist fundamentalism for what it is: an anachronism that only makes sense to people who have been schooled within a particular tradition, not something that makes any intrinsic sense in itself!

So, my intention with this post was to (hopefully) receive some views from you guys about behaviorism, whether it a science, or has impeded science.

 

[Jeff Corey]

This shows a profound misunderstanding of radical behaviorism. "They thought that all behavior was learned on the basis of psychologically undefinable aspects of rewards and punishments. They explicitly chose to ignore the likelihood that affective changes in the brain gave rewarding and punishing events the power to control behavior."
The first sentence is just wrong - "psychologically undefinable"?
The second sentence makes no sense to me at all.

 

[Potentiated Synapse]

Neuroscience can't be purely behaviorist because it is the study of how the brain works mechanistically. Like you said, classic behaviorism is only interested in behavior that can be observed and measured and thus is not interested in hypothesizing about internal states or the neurophysiology of the brain/mind.

Now when one talks about behavioral neuroscience, they are describing a discipline within neuroscience interested in the neurobiological underpinnings of behavior, usually involving some kind of training or conditioning. For example, many neuroscientists are looking for the physiological basis of "reward" or "punishment" signals in the brain important for learning. Many of the training paradigms do come from behaviorism, however you will not find any legitimate neuroscientists that say the workings of the brain aren't of importance.