Differential consequences were used to increase obedience and decrease aggressive behavior in a four-and-one-half year old boy. Treatment was conducted in the child's home by his mother.Traditional forms of child therapy attempt to modify problem behaviors by placing the child in an artificial environment where he interacts with a highly trained specialist. Treatment is usually based upon the assumption that deviant behaviors are symptoms of some underlying emotional disturbance, and treatment is designed to modify these hypothetical underlying causes. However, a learning theory approach suggests that both desirable and undesirable behaviors of the child are maintained by their effects upon the child's natural environment (Bijou and Sloane, 1966). If this is true, the most efficient way to modify deviant behavior may be to change the reactions of the natural milieu to that behavior.Differential social reinforcement and the use of a timeout from reinforcement have been successfully used to change children's behaviors in a nursery school setting (Harris, Wolf, and Baer, 1964; Sloane, Johnston, and Bijou, in press). In Wahler, Winkel, Peterson, and Morrison's (1965) report of the use of social reinforcement to modify children's problem behavior, the children's mothers, rather than a nursery school teacher, served as therapists. Under controlled laboratory conditions, each mother interacted with her child in specific ways on cue from the experimenter. Russo
A complex reversal design was used to investigate the effectiveness of self-modeling procedures in reducing aggression and noncompliance in six preschool-age children. Self-modeling was compared with peer modeling and a control condition over a ten-week period. Follow-up and maintenance of behavior change was studied, as was generalization. No positive effects were found for the selfmodeling intervention in reducing instances of aggression or noncompliance. Supplementary analysis of four subjects' data further showed no increase in prosocial behavior as a function of the self-modeling intervention.
Five parents of nonverbal children were trained in two home settings to modify antecedents and consequences to their children's vocalizations. Generalization effects of the parent training on both the parent's and children's behaviors under different stimulus conditions were investigated using multiple-baseline designs. Increases in parent prompting and reinforcing their children's vocalizations generalized only minimally to a new setting in the home where parent training had not occurred. Child increases in vocalizations produced by the parents in the training settings did generalize to this new setting in the home. There was minimal generalization of child vocalizations to a free-play setting at school. In a formal speech session conducted by a behavior specialist at school, only one child showed definite increases in acquisition rate as a function of the parents starting to train the sound at home.
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