Developing positive social-emotional behaviors: a study of training and generalization effects.
Simple tell-show-praise lessons lift smiles, sharing, and friendly touch in handicapped children, but you must program extra steps for kind words to spread.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Four handicapped children learned four friendly acts: smile, share, give a pat, and say a kind word.
Adults first explained the skill, then showed it, then praised each try. The team tracked each act across weeks to see if it stuck.
What they found
All four kids quickly used more smiles, shares, and pats after training. Smiles and sharing also popped up with new kids who never got the lessons. Kind words did not spread, but most gains lasted a full month.
How this fits with other research
Phillips (1968) got one boy to smile years earlier with candy and praise. Lewis et al. (1976) built on that idea but added modeling and taught a whole bundle of social acts.
Rutter et al. (1987) flipped the script: instead of teaching the disabled child, they trained the popular kids to start chats. Untrained classmates then joined in, showing the same peer-wave effect P saw for smiles and sharing.
Wahler (1969) warned that change made at home can stay trapped at home. P’s team saw the same wall: friendly words stayed in the training room unless extra steps moved them out.
Why it matters
You can grow smiles, sharing, and gentle touches in minutes with three cheap tools: tell, show, and praise. To make kind words travel, plan extra practice across places and people. Start with high-status peers if you want the whole room to warm up.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Four handicapped children were taught four positive social-emotional behaviors: smiling, sharing, positive physical contacting, and verbal complimenting, using instructions, modelling, and praise. Rates of these behaviors were shown to increase in four trained subjects using a within-subject multiple-baseline experimental design. The generality of the behavior change was investigated by integrating three untrained subjects with the trained subjects in a setting free of adult-imposed contingencies and through a series of follow-up observations. Three trained subjects evidenced collateral increases in the generalization setting on at least one other behavior when training in smiling was conducted. One trained subject showed generalization session increases for each behavior when training was conducted to increase that behavior. All three untrained subjects demonstrated increased rates of smiling and sharing when interventions were conducted to increase those behaviors with the trained subjects. There was no appreciable generalization of verbal complimenting by either the trained or the untrained subjects. Both trained and untrained subjects generally maintained their increased rates of smiling, sharing, and positive physical contacting across four weeks of follow-up observations.
Journal of applied behavior analysis, 1976 · doi:10.1901/jaba.1976.9-65