Development of social responses in two severely retarded children

The effect of reinforcement dependent on the social responses of two severely retarded withdrawn children was investigated. During 30 training sessions (30 min each) food and praise were administered dependent upon the children's mutual participation in a ball-rolling and block-passing task. Both children showed a progressive increase in social interaction in a non-training situation during this reinforcement period. After the reinforcement procedures were removed, social behavior decreased markedly. Response generalization to children not involved in training occurred.     

The effects of test anxiety, sex of subject, and type of verbal reinforcement on maze performance of elementary school children

The purpose of this study was to account for children's performance in an educational setting by evaluating individual difference factors and the subjects' differential responsivities to social reinforcement The child subjects performed on Porteus mazes, which were viewed as complex, stress-inducing tasks They were differentiated in terms of sex and test anxiety levels. Each child received the same number of noncontingent reinforcements, which consisted of either verbal praise or verbal criticism or no feedback The data yielded significant triple interaction effects among anxiety, sex, and social reinforcement for the time and error scores on the mazes The data were discussed in terms of their implications for remediating performance in educational settings and their support for the theoretical conception of test anxiety as a chronic drive state The authors concluded that the extrinsic, motivating effects of verbal reinforcement can be reasonably characterized, but only if one attends to individual differences among those subjects being reinforced.