Independent control of a pre-school child's aggression and peer interaction by contingent teacher attention.
Ignoring aggression while immediately praising peer play flips a preschooler’s behavior in both directions.
01Research in Context
What this study did
The teacher watched one preschool child during free play.
When the child hit or grabbed, the teacher turned away and stayed silent.
When the child shared, talked, or played nicely with peers, the teacher walked over, smiled, and praised.
The team repeated this across three play periods to be sure the change was real.
What they found
Aggression dropped to almost zero each time the teacher ignored it.
Peer play jumped to three times the baseline level when the teacher praised it.
When the plan was stopped, aggression returned and play dropped.
Each restart gave the same clean flip, proving teacher attention drove the change.
How this fits with other research
Lloyd et al. (1969) got the same near-zero aggression, but used timeout plus rewards in a hospital ward.
The new study shows you can reach the same result with no timeout—just ignoring and praising in a regular preschool.
Raslear et al. (1992) later moved the job to classmates. They taught typical peers to prompt and praise kids with autism during play.
Both papers tripled social contact, showing the agent can be teacher or peer once the contingency is clear.
Why it matters
You can tame hitting and boost friendship skills at the same time with one simple rule: give your face, voice, and proximity to the behavior you want, and withhold it from the behavior you don’t. No extra rooms, tokens, or gadgets needed. Try it during centers tomorrow—keep your hands busy with a clipboard, but your eyes and words only for cooperative acts.
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Join Free →Pick one free-play period, track every hit and every cooperative share, and give excited teacher attention only for the shares while turning your body away from hits for ten minutes.
02At a glance
03Original abstract
This study demonstrated the existent role of contingent teacher attention in maintaining a preschool child's aggression to his peers, as well as an imposed use of contingent teacher attention to increase his low peer interaction. Aggression and peer interaction were analyzed independently as two baselines of multiple baseline design; each was subjected to at least one reversal. The multiple baseline design was used to examine three possibilities: (1) that the high rate of aggressive behavior was in itself impeding the emergence of peer interaction; (2) that contingent teacher attention could be used to maintain a reduced rate of aggressive behavior; and (3) that a similar use of teacher attention could maintain an increased rate of peer interaction. The technique of largely ignoring the subject's aggressive behavior and attending instead to whatever child he was attacking decreased his aggressive behavior to an acceptable rate. Two reversals of this technique displayed experimental control, each recovering the high baseline rate of aggression. After the aggressive behavior was decreased for the final time, teachers attended to the subject only when he was involved in social interaction with peers, and they thus increased his social interaction to a high rate. Later, they withdrew their attention for social interaction and reversed the effect and finally then recovered it.
Journal of applied behavior analysis, 1973 · doi:10.1901/jaba.1973.6-115