Effects of modeling, video modeling, prompting, and reinforcement strategies on increasing helping behavior in children with autism.
Item
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Title
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Effects of modeling, video modeling, prompting, and reinforcement strategies on increasing helping behavior in children with autism.
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Identifier
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AAI3008865
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identifier
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3008865
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Creator
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Reeve, Sharon Ann.
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Contributor
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Adviser: Claire L. Poulson
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Date
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2001
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Psychology, Behavioral | Psychology, Developmental
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Abstract
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Individuals with autism are typically severely impaired in their social development, particularly in their ability to engage in prosocial behavior. Prosocial behavior includes responses involved in helping, cooperating, sharing, care-giving, turn-taking, affection, empathy, and sympathy. The purpose of the present study was to assess the extent to which children with autism could be taught to engage in prosocial behavior, and the extent to which such behavior generalized. A multiple-baseline across-participants design was used to accomplish this. The participants were four children with autism between the ages of 5--6 years. Verbal and nonverbal helping responses were taught in the presence of multiple exemplars of verbal and nonverbal discriminative stimuli drawn from four experimenter-defined categories of helping behavior (e.g., locating objects, carrying objects, putting away items, setting up an activity) through the use of video modeling, prompting, and reinforcement strategies. Data were collected during training trials, probe trials, and pre- and post-intervention session trials to determine the extent to which these responses were learned and emitted under both trained and novel conditions. With the successive introduction of the teaching procedure, all four children learned to emit appropriate combined verbal and motor helping responses in the presence of nonverbal and verbal discriminative stimuli from all four of the training categories. There was, however, no difference among children in the number of trials needed to learn the combined verbal and motor helping responses and the separate motor and verbal helping components. Generalization of the combined verbal and motor helping responses was observed in the presence of untrained discriminative stimuli during the probe trials. Finally, the pre- and post-intervention measures showed that the frequency of verbal and motor helping responses also increased in the presence of novel stimuli, in a novel setting, and with a novel instructor. These outcomes benefit a child with autism because engagement in prosocial behavior may increase the likelihood of that child becoming more socially rewarding to others, providing the child with additional access to social reinforcement, and thereby increasing the likelihood of his/her engaging in additional social behavior.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
