Baptistussi, M. C. (2010). The effect of verbal and nonverbal variables on children's foodchoice behavior. Doctoral thesis, Psychology Institute, University of São Paulo, São Paulo, under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Maria Martha Costa Hubner. Salzinger (1998) defines verbal behavior as an operant subject to consequences and argues that verbal behavior is part of a chain of verbal and nonverbal, overt or covert responses, being closely involved in managing other behaviors sometimes as "cause", acting as a discriminative stimulus, and other times playing an effect role. In this verbal enchainment, it is of fundamental importance to study the role of rules as verbal stimuli which describe reinforcing contingencies in a complete or partial manner and consequences, and control the likelihood of a response. The objective of this paper was to investigate the effect of antecedent verbal variables with and without autoclytics, consequents with autoclytics and nonverbal consequents, on the onset and maintenance of the behavior to choose varied foods for breakfast, considering the different food groups. To this end, twenty children aged between 10 and 12 were equally divided into five experiments with different arrangements as to the use of verbal and nonverbal variants. On the food choice table, there were four types of foods representing carbohydrates, two for fats and four for proteins, with a varied choice being considered as the response to choose at least two types of carbohydrates and proteins and one of fats. In all, ten different variables were tested in this study, with nine of them being verbal and one nonverbal, between antecedents and consequents, distributed among the experiments so as to maintain a balance of the number of phases in each one of them. There were antecedent variables with various degrees of description of the response the child was supposed to perform, each with different autoclytics, individually-and groupapplied variables and an aversive control variable. In some experiments we tried to reverse the phases using an antecedent variable with the phases which used a consequent variable, in order to establish a comparison as to their effectiveness in the onset and maintenance of the varied choice behavior. The main results indicate greater verbal control of consequent verbal variables with autoclytics and of antecedent variables with specific autoclytics and with detailed description of the response, which increases discriminability of the response-related stimuli and the likelihood of performing it. In addition to the assessment that components of the verbal variable may work better in controlling nonverbal behavior, the study evidences the important role played by social variables in the effectiveness of verbal control. It was identified, especially in experiment 5, that verbal control is higher in group, both regarding the change of behavior by all participants and its maintenance after verbal control was removed. General discussions on the results show that the food choice behavior seems to h...
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