CONTINGENT OBSERVATION: AN EFFECTIVE AND ACCEPTABLE PROCEDURE FOR REDUCING DISRUPTIVE BEHAVIOR OF YOUNG CHILDREN IN A GROUP SETTING1

Since a major task of childhood is learning to get along in a group without disrupting other children's activities, caregivers need explicit guidelines for gentle but effective procedures for dealing with disruptive behaviors in child-care settings. In a day-care center for normal 1- and 2-yr-old children, an effort was made to develop a procedure that appeared sufficiently humane and educational to be acceptable to parents and daycare workers, and yet effective in reducing disruptive play behaviors. Caregivers used the occasion of disruptive behavior to instruct the child in appropriate alternatives, then had the child sit on the periphery and observe the appropriate social behavior of the other children, “sit and watch”, for a brief period before inviting him or her to rejoin the play activities. The effectiveness of this procedure was compared with a method commonly recommended for use with young children: instructing the child, then distracting or redirecting the child to an alternative toy or activity. Contingent observation, combining instruction with a brief timeout (from being a participant in an activity to becoming an observer of the activity), proved considerably more effective in maintaining low levels of disruptions and was considered by caregivers and parents to be an appropriate and socially acceptable method of dealing with young children's disruptive behaviors. Therefore, contingent observation can be recommended for general use in day-care programs for young children.     

A behavioral analysis of incentive prompts for motivating seat belt use

The seat belt usage of drivers was observed at the entrance to two campus parking lots during morning arrival times. After 11 days of baseline, fliers which prompted seat belt wearing were handed to drivers of incoming vehicles. At one parking lot all fliers offered a chance to win a prize (noncontingent rewards); while at the second lot only those fliers given to seat belt wearers included a chance to win a prize (contingent rewards). After 24 consecutive observation days, these interventions were removed for 14 days of withdrawal. The recording of vehicle license plates enabled an analysis of belt usage per individual over repeated exposures to the experimental conditions. At the lot with the contingent reward intervention, mean belt usage was 26.3% during baseline, 45.7% during treatment, and 37.9% during withdrawal. At the noncontingent reward lot, the mean percentage of belt wearing was 22.2% during baseline, 24.1% during treatment, and 21.8% during withdrawal. The analysis of repeated exposures per individual verified that only contingent rewards influenced substantial increases in belt wearing, and showed that most of the influence occurred after the initial incentive prompt.     

CONTINGENT EXERCISE: A MILD BUT POWERFUL PROCEDURE FOR SUPPRESSING INAPPROPRIATE VERBAL AND AGGRESSIVE BEHAVIOR

Two single-subject experiments were conducted in public school classrooms for severely emotionally disturbed children. Both experiments investigated the effects of a treatment requiring a child to exhibit a simple exercise task after a verbal or aggressive response, using reversal and multiple-baseline designs. The independent variable, contingent exercise, required standing up and sitting on the floor five to ten times contingent on an inappropriate behavior. It was found that contingent exercise was easy to carry out, and following it, the child quickly returned to the learning task that had been interrupted by the inappropriate behavior. The contingent exercise procedure required a minimum of prompting or manual guidance. Although contingent exercise was not topographically related to the inappropriate response, it decreased those responses dramatically. The results suggested that contingent exercise was not only more powerful than DRO but also could be administered independently. It was concluded that contingent exercise may constitute an alternative procedure that can be used by therapists confronted with severely abnormal behaviors. It would appear to be particularly relevant in settings where procedures such as timeout and painful consequences find restricted use. Finally, a number of guidelines have been proposed as a safeguard against the misuse of this mild but powerful procedure.     

Attentional capture by irrelevant emotional distractor faces is contingent on implicit attentional settings

Although expressions of facial emotion hold a special status in attention relative to other complex objects, whether they summon our attention automatically and against our intentions remains a debated issue. Studies supporting the strong view that attentional capture by facial expressions of emotion is entirely automatic reported that a unique (singleton) emotional face distractor interfered with search for a target that was also unique on a different dimension. Participants could therefore search for the odd-one out face to locate the target and attentional capture by irrelevant emotional faces might be contingent on the adoption of an implicit set for singletons. Here, confirming this hypothesis, an irrelevant emotional face captured attention when the target was the unique face with a discrepant orientation, both when this orientation was unpredictable and when it remained constant. By contrast, no such capture was observed when the target could not be found by monitoring displays for a discrepant face and participants had to search for a face with a specific orientation. Our findings show that attentional capture by emotional faces is not purely stimulus driven and thereby resolve the apparent inconsistency that prevails in the literature on the automaticity of attentional capture by emotional faces.     

Selectively ignoring locations does not modulate contingent involuntary orienting,but selectively attending does

Attending to a location in the visual field facilitates processing of objects in that location, and numerous studies have revealed processing benefits by precuing target locations. Recent studies have also demonstrated that precuing a location to ignore reduces distraction by items in that location; however, precuing a feature (colour) to ignore increases distractor interference, at least before a template for rejection is established. Thus, locations, not features, can be selectively ignored. The present study used a spatial cuing task to examine whether featurally-relevant items are selected when they appear in ignored locations. The results revealed contingent attentional capture by target-relevant cues (red cue when searching for red targets, but not for onset targets), even when the cue appeared in a location that was ignored. Importantly, this was equivalent to contingent capture elicited by cues in non-ignored locations. However, when observers were precued to the target location, contingent capture was largely eliminated. The results suggest salient items with target-relevant features are selected from selectively ignored locations, but focusing attention onto a location can preclude capture by salient and target-relevant items.     

Newborn behavioral observations system in rural Pakistan: A feasibility and acceptability study

The Newborn Behavioral Observations (NBO) system is a relationship-based tool that helps parents recognize their infant's competencies and learn their behavioral cues, with the goals of enhancing parental responsiveness and satisfaction in the infant-parent relationship. In our study, a pediatrician integrated the NBO into 44 pediatric health care visits of infants in rural Pakistan villages, under the remote guidance of two U.S.-based child psychiatrists. A clinician then gave the mothers a survey about their experience of the NBO and found that the mothers were highly satisfied, reporting greater appreciation of their infant's strengths, greater understanding of their infant's behavioral cues, stronger attachment to their infant, and greater self-confidence as a mother. In their consideration of these results, the authors explore cultural reasons for the mothers’ responses and generate hypotheses to inform an outcome study of a similar intervention. This was a feasibility and acceptability study and was not randomized, had no control group, and did not use objective measures of outcome.     

Positive crossover: Parent perceived partner responsiveness and health of youth with asthma

Romantic relationship functioning has implications that extend beyond the romantic dyad. This study tests whether a key positive aspect of relationships, perceived partner responsiveness, can cross over from parents' romantic relationships to children's health and well-being via parenting behavior. In a sample of 112 youth with asthma and their primary caregivers, when caregivers perceived higher partner responsiveness in their romantic relationship, youth experienced improved self-reported asthma symptoms, pulmonary functioning, and positive affect. The associations were robust while controlling for parents' relationship conflict and other relevant covariates, except for the pulmonary functioning outcome, which was instead predicted by parents' conflict. However, parenting behavior (i.e., positive and negative parenting) did not appear to mediate these links. This work highlights the importance of positive romantic relationship processes for youth health and well-being, emphasizing the relevance of clinical intervention work and the need to continue investigating mechanisms through which these processes may be linked.     

Sensitive caregiving and reward responsivity: A novel mechanism linking parenting and executive functions development in early childhood

Sensitive caregiving is an essential aspect of positive parenting that influences executive functions development, but the mechanisms underlying this association are less clear. Using data from the Family Life Project, a large prospective longitudinal sample of 1292 families residing in rural, predominately low-income communities, the current study examined whether sensitive caregiving impacts executive functions development by shaping behavioral reward processing systems in early postnatal life. Results indicated that higher levels of sensitive caregiving during infancy were associated with heightened reward responsivity at age 4, which in turn predicted superior executive functions ability at age 5. Notably, children's reward responsivity partially mediated the relationship between sensitive caregiving in infancy and executive functions ability at school entry. These findings add to prior work on early experience and children's executive functions and highlight caregiver scaffolding of developing reward processing systems as a potential foundational mechanism for supporting adaptive behavior and self-regulation across the lifespan.     

Responsive Parenting in the Second Year: Specific Influences on Children's Language and Play

In two longitudinal studies, relations between dimensions of maternal responsiveness at 13 months and children's language and play abilities at 13 and at 20 months were examined. We characterized mothers' responsive exchanges by assessing the targets of maternal responses (i.e. what child activities mothers respond to) and the verbal contents of maternal responses (i.e. what mothers said when they responded), and we asked whether subtypes of responsiveness would relate differentially to children's language and play abilities. In general, maternal responsiveness to children's vocalizations predicted children's language, and maternal responses to children's play predicted children's play. These findings suggest that maternal responsiveness can be profitably categorized into subtypes that relate to domains of child outcomes in specialized ways. The specific nature of mother–child associations in the domains of early language and play is discussed. © 1996 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.