Secondary Reinforced Behavior in an Operant Situation among Dogs

Three- to five-year-old children (N = 134) approached each other in two experiments investigating age, sex, and dyadic sex composition differences in a social manifestation of the awareness of the sex of self and of others. Children of both sexes and at all ages both stopped and oriented their bodies farther away from opposite-sex peers than from same-sex peers, regardless of age-status or familiarity. A nonverbal technique, which is readily reproducible and experimentally manipulatable, is presented which measures an aspect of early awareness of one's own sex and that of others in an obviously meaningful interpersonal context.     

THE USE OF PROMPTS TO ENHANCE VICARIOUS EFFECTS OF NONVERBAL APPROVAL

The effect of nonverbal teacher approval (physical contact in the form of patting approvingly) delivered to target subjects on the attentive behavior of adjacent peers was examined in a special-education classroom. In a reversal design, two pairs of moderately retarded children were exposed to nonverbal approval, with only one subject in each pair receiving approval. In different phases, nonverbal approval was delivered alone or in conjunction with a verbal prompt directed to the adjacent peer or to the class as a whole. The prompt was designed to make salient the target subject's attentive behavior and the nonverbal reinforcing consequences that followed. Providing contingent nonverbal approval alone consistently altered attentive behavior of the target subjects but did not alter the attentive behavior of adjacent peers. However, accompanying nonverbal approval with a verbal prompt did increase attentive behavior of nonreinforced peers.     

Decreased Reception of Nonverbal Cues in Heroin Addicts

The ability to interpret nonverbal cues was tested in 15 young, white American male heroin addicts who were not intoxicated. When their responses were compared with those of age-matched controls, addicts were found to be significantly less accurate in reading nonverbal communications.     

Can Deception by Salespersons and Customers Be Detected Through Nonverbal Behavioral Cues?1

Experiments on behavioral lie detection have indicated that observers can detect a communicator's lies with above-chance accuracy, and that detection accuracy may be enhanced when observers pay special attention to certain vocal and body-movement cues. The present experiment asked whether deception in (simulated) sales communications by retail salespersons and automobile customers could likewise be detected nonverbally. Contrary to much of the prior literature, deception-detection in this study was not above chance, apparently because the salespersons' and customers' nonverbal cues simply were not correlated with lying. Though the observers seemed quite suspicious and did not give communicators the “benefit of the doubt”, they could not discriminate the communicators' deceptive communications from their truthful ones. Many—perhaps most—of the lies in sales communications may be told by confident, well-practiced deceivers whose nonverbal behavior is unlikely to reveal their lying.     

The roles of private speech and inner speech in planning during middle childhood: Evidence from a dual task paradigm

Children often talk themselves through their activities, producing private speech that is internalized to form inner speech. This study assessed the effect of articulatory suppression (which suppresses private and inner speech) on Tower of London performance in 7- to 10-year-olds, relative to performance in a control condition with a nonverbal secondary task. Experiment 1 showed no effect of articulatory suppression on performance with the standard Tower of London procedure; we interpret this in terms of a lack of planning in our sample. Experiment 2 used a modified procedure in which participants were forced to plan ahead. Performance in the articulatory suppression condition was lower than that in the control condition, consistent with a role for self-directed (private and inner) speech in planning. On problems of intermediate difficulty, participants producing more private speech in the control condition showed greater susceptibility to interference from articulatory suppression than their peers, suggesting that articulatory suppression interfered with performance by blocking self-directed (private and inner) speech.     

LEADERSHIP AND NONVERBAL BEHAVIORS OF HISPANIC FEMALES ACROSS SCHOOL EQUITY ENVIRONMENTS

Nonverbal behaviors of Hispanic elementary school students and their peers were examined in a small-group cooperative task with a total of 202 subjects. Thirty-five randomly selected groups were videotaped in ten desegregated schools; each group was gender-homogeneous, with three Hispanic and three Anglo students. Analysis of the videotapes revealed that Hispanic females used less vertical and horizontal space than Anglo females, and were also less likely to verbally interrupt or physically intrude on other group members. They had similar rates of handling the group resource cards and were given similar leadership scores by multi-ethnic trained observers. Among males, Hispanics are significantly more likely to use vertical or upward movements and physical intrusions, while Anglos use more verbal interruptions.
School and social status factors such as high-and low-equity desegregated school programs, ethnic and gender status, and school status variables of academic grades and English word knowledge had varying effects on teacher and peer ratings of leadership. High-equity schools garnered higher leadership scores for Hispanic females from both peers and teachers when all other nonverbal behaviors were controlled. This positive effect of the school on leadership ratings was evident only for males in teacher ratings. Hispanic females and their peers do reflect adult models of nonverbal behavior and leadership, and that leadership is enhanced in the perceptions of teachers and peers when they participate in a high-equity desegregated elementary school.     

Identifying emergent leaders from verbal and nonverbal communications.

Subject/observers were accurate in identifying emergent leadership hierarchies on four leadership dimensions when provided records of target groups' meetings containing only verbal communications, only nonverbal communications, or both types of behavior. With knowledge of participation rates controlled by covariance, the subject/observers' accuracy scores retained significance in three of the information conditions demonstrating the presence of verbal and nonverbal leadership cues independent of participation rates. The value of verbal and nonverbal communications to identifying leaders varied with the type of leadership hierarchy being identified. The findings are presumed to hold for leader selection as well. The author proposes that the question of why a group member has emerged to fulfill a leadership role in a group be studied from the point of view of group members' selecting leaders or permitting emergence rather than leaders emitting behaviors.     

Sex differences in nonverbal communication

An experiment was conducted to determine the relationship between sex-role attitudes, affiliation, and dominance and nonverbal communication styles in men and women in same- and opposite-sex dyads. Women were found to elicit more warmth and men more anxiety from their partners. Evidence was found for a possible monitoring mechanism through which women adjust their nonverbal communications to fit the male in the interaction. Liberalism in sex-role attitudes was found to correlate with nonverbal warmth in men. The nonverbal presentations of men and women in the microprocesses of dyadic interaction were found to relate significantly to the macrostructure of societal sex roles.This research was supported by NSF Grant GS36814. The author wishes to express her special thanks to Harmon Hosch, Vivian Shayne, David Fineman, and Lee Braff for their help in the experiment and data analysis. An abbreviated version of this paper was presented at the meeting of the American Sociological Association, San Francisco, August 1975.     

不同社会行为倾向小学生的同伴地位特点*

采用个体中心的视角,通过班级戏剧和同伴提名法考查小学生社会行为与同伴接纳间的关系。结构频率分析发现：（1）具有高水平积极社会行为的儿童易受同伴欢迎,不易受同伴拒绝。具有高水平积极社会行为又伴有高退缩行为的儿童在低年级时也会受同伴欢迎。（2）高水平的攻击行为易受到同伴拒绝或争议。具有高水平攻击行为的儿童,当伴有高退缩行为时,在低年级时易受到同伴拒绝,在中高年级时易受到同伴争议。（3）社会行为倾向不显著者易获得一般而不易获得受争议的同伴关系,但在中低年级时不易受同伴欢迎。     

Linguistic and nonlinguistic creativity of deaf children

Literature concerning the development of deaf children contains frequent suggestions that they have less linguistic creativity than hearing peers but are comparable to, and may even exceed, hearing peers on tests of nonverbal creativity. The studies that serve as the bases for these claims contain many contradictions, however, and many have methodological and statistical shortcomings that could seriously qualify their conclusions. The relevant research, therefore, is critically reviewed here. In general, deaf children appear to be far more creative in their language production skills than typically is assumed, and they demonstrate considerable flexibility in structured comprehension tasks. Evidence concerning nonlinguistic creativity is less clear, with contradictory findings emerging from similar studies involving the same nonverbal tests.     

Can Children Detect Conceptual Information Conveyed Through Other Children's Nonverbal Behavior's

Research suggests that children produce nonverbal behaviors when interacting with adults and peers. This study investigates how well other children can detect 1 specific type of nonverbal behavior: representational gestures. Eighteen children (12 Caucasian girls and 6 Caucasian boys; M = 7 years, 11 months) watched videotaped stimuli of children verbally and gesturally explaining a conceptual problem. Multiple methods were used to assess whether children could detect information conveyed through the stimulus children's speech and gesture. Results show that these multiple methods converge to demonstrate that children attend not only to other children's speech but also to their gestures. Implications of nonverbal detection for peer interactions and cognitive development are discussed.     

Verbal and nonverbal communication in at-risk mother-child dyads: Implications for relationship quality and developing positive social behaviours in middle-childhood

Factors that promote healthy relationships have been understudied. The objective of this study is to examine mother–child verbal and nonverbal communication (separately), relationship quality and children's positive social behaviours in an at-risk sample framed within the developmental psychopathology approach. Mothers are part of a 35-year longitudinal prospective study who, as children, were rated by peers on measures of aggression and social withdrawal. These mothers, with their own 9- to 13-year-old children, participated in conflict and game-playing tasks. Verbal and nonverbal communication were coded separately using systematic observational measures. Maternal childhood histories of aggression and withdrawal predicted poorer dyad verbal communication, relationship quality and children's positive social behaviours. Frequently displayed positive verbal and nonverbal communication were associated with better relationship quality and children's positive social behaviours. The results highlight the unique contributions of verbal and nonverbal communication to adaptive development and to promoting healthy relationships in at-risk families during middle-childhood.     

Children’s Evaluation and Categorization of Transgender Children

Despite extant evidence of negative peer treatment of transgender adolescents and adults, little is known about how young children perceive transgender peers, particularly those who have socially transitioned or are living in line with their gender rather than sex at birth. Whereas children have been shown to be averse to gender nonconformity in peers, because many transgender children appear and behave in ways consistent with their expressed gender (but not their sex at birth), it is unclear how children evaluate these identities. In 2 studies, we investigated 5- to 10-year-old children’s (N_total = 113) preferences for transgender versus gender-“typical” peers who either shared their gender identity or did not. We also examined whether children categorized transgender peers by their sex or expressed gender, as it might inform their evaluations. Children preferred cisgender peers over transgender peers; however, they also liked peers of their own gender rather than the other gender (e.g., female participants preferred girls over boys), demonstrating that the oft-documented own-gender bias plays an important role even when children are reasoning about transgender peers. Children did not reliably categorize transgender peers by sex or gender; yet those who categorized transgender peers by their sex showed greater dislike of transgender peers. The current studies are the first to investigate cisgender children’s attitudes toward transgender children and suggest that perceptions of gender categorization and conformity play a role in children’s evaluations of transgender peers.     

Some cognitive and social correlates of children’s fluency in riddle-telling

Cognitive and social correlates of riddle-telling were investigated in a matched-pairs design. Fluent riddle-tellers from two age groups (six to eight years and eight to eleven years) were matched with their peers who told few riddles or none at all. The children’s cognitive abilities were measured on nine verbal and four nonverbal tasks, and their social adjustment estimated by teacher reports and sociometric tests. Riddle-tellers in the younger age group were further advanced cognitively and less well-adjusted socially than their peers who did not know any riddles. Only cognitive correlates of riddle-telling were found for children in the older age group. The results suggest the need for future investigations of riddle-telling to consider both cognitive and social factors and to expect different patterns of correlates according to children’s degree of experience in riddle-telling.     

Interference control in children with reading difficulties

Two studies investigated whether the greater Stroop interference reported in children with reading difficulties compared to typical readers of the same age represents a generalized deficit in interference control or a consequence of their reading problems. In Study 1, a color-word Stroop task and a nonverbal task involving responses to locations associated with pictures were administered to 23 children with single word reading difficulties and 22 typically developing children matched for age and nonverbal ability. Children with reading difficulties showed disproportionate interference effects in the color-word Stroop but not the nonverbal task. In Study 2, groups of poor and typical readers completed a spatial Stroop task with printed input that did not require a verbal response and a nonverbal analogue. Both groups showed comparable interference in these two tasks. Thus, the reported problems in the color-word Stroop task in children with reading difficulties do not appear to entail general impairments in interference control.     

On Unconscious Communications and Covert Enactments: Some Reflections on Their Role in the Analytic Situation

By means of an extended clinical example, this paper focuses on the impact that unconscious communications in the form of nonverbal behavior may have on the course and outcome of an analysis.

Responding to sudden catastrophic illnesses in their fathers, patient and analyst created enactments aimed at blinding them to hard truths about their relationships with this parent.

Serving as powerful resistances that led to a stalemate and all but ended treatment, these nonverbal enactments had to be recognized, confronted, and understood by both participants before analytic work could be resumed and progress achieved in this analysis.     

Toddlers' responses to the distress of their peers

Toddlers' spontaneous prosocial responses to their peer's crying distress were examined in this study. Forty-three children ranging in age from 16 to 33 months were observed as they interacted with their peers in day-care centers. Each child was observed for 16, 5-min periods. If a child cried, the response of the peer and the response of the teacher were recorded. Teachers independently identified peer friendships. Ninety-three percent of peer responses to cries were prosocial in nature. Children who responded more often prosocially to crying peers were the children who more often cried themselves. The response of the teacher to the child's own cry was related to that child's response to a peer. Children were more likely to respond to friends' cries than to cries of acquaintances.     

Communicating about a social interaction: Effects on memory for protagonists’ statements and nonverbal behaviors

People’s communications about a social interaction they have observed can often decrease their memory for the protagonists’ statements and behaviors. The nature of this decrement depends on both the type of communication and the type of item to be remembered. Participants in three experiments observed a movie of an interaction with the objective of merely comprehending it. Later, they wrote their impressions of the characters involved or alternately described the sequence of events that occurred. Communicating impressions of the protagonists decreased recognition of the statements that protagonists made but had little effect on the recognition of nonverbal behaviors. However, describing the sequence of events that occurred decreased recognition of both statements and nonverbal behaviors. A visual reminder of protagonists’ behaviors increased recognition of both these behaviors and the statements that accompanied them, whereas an auditory reminder of protagonists’ statements decreased recognition of nonverbal behaviors. Results were conceptualized in terms of the different mental representations that people use as a basis for judgment and the processes that underlie their construction.