In recent years, considerable attention has been given to a social information processing model as a means of understanding interaction patterns in children. Within the framework of that model, systematic biases have been found in the manner in which aggressive children process social information. The present study sought to extend that literature by applying the model to younger children, by examining the processing of withdrawn, as well as aggressive, children, and by employing traditional affect recognition tasks as the stimuli. Sixty preschool children were nominated by their classroom teachers as either aggressive, withdrawn, or well adjusted, according to their predominant interaction style. The children were then tested, using a set of affect recognition tasks which assessed stimulus encoding and interpretation. Stimuli consisted of facial expression photos and context stories portraying one of four emotions (Happy, Sad, Mad, or Neutral). The hypotheses of the study predicted systematic biases in stimulus encoding and interpretation, consistent with the subjects’ behavioral style. Analyses failed to support the hypotheses in that the groups failed to show identifiable systematic biases. Exploratory analyses revealed that subgroups of subjects demonstrated such biases, but those biases were related only to level of developmental maturity. The discussion of the findings explored issues which may have led to the negative results. Further research directions were also discussed which will help to clarify the questions raised by the present study. / Ph. D.

The project contributes to the significance of special education by providing information on how to identify early signs of autism in order to implement appropriate strategies as early as possible and by examining the effectiveness of early intervention programs. A quantitative and qualitative approach was used to measure the responses of parents and special educators regarding the importance of early detection of autism for early socialization of children before entering the school setting.

Thesis (Ed. D.)--University of North Texas, Aug., 2007. / Title from title page display. Includes bibliographical references.

Previous research has been interested in studying parental emotion socialization practices in parents of typically developing (TD) children. The current study aimed to explore such practices among parents of children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD).Seventy-eight families participated in this study. Self-reported rating scales were adopted to measure the child's social competence, parenting stress and maternal emotional styles. As hypothesized, results showed significantly different patterns in maternal emotional styles between mothers of children with ASD and those with TD children. However, inconsistent to our hypothesis, the maternal emotional styles were found to be neither related to child's social competence nor parenting stress within the ASD group. Implications of findings on future research and practice are discussed. / published_or_final_version / Educational Psychology / Master / Master of Social Sciences

A 4-year old child with autism was taught to make a social initiation statement following a remote-controlled tactile prompt (RCT). The RCT prompt was taught by using a time-delay procedure with written script cards containing initiation statements. Training trials occurred in 6 different play locations in the child's room. Restricted Trial training consisted of allowing the child to play independently, activating the RCT prompt and playing with the child based on any initiation until a warning to end was given. In Free Play training, the warning to end the activity was removed. The child's initiation statements increased from 0 in baseline, to spontaneous initiations in 100% of the trials in all training and generalization phases. The number of words in an initiation statement increased from 3 to 25 per trial. Spontaneous initiations in the No RCT phase generalized to the child's mother without training.

Autistic adolescents need direct, systematic training of social skills since major difficulties in communication, lack of empathy, and various changes during adolescence present major roadblocks to the acquisition of normal peer relationships and increasing independence. A case study approach was utilized to examine treatment effects of a social skills training program implemented with four autistic adolescent boys in a naturalistic setting. Findings based on objective measures and subjective reports indicated that each subject made gains in targeted social skills over the course of treatment. Treatment strategies such as modeling, coaching, roleplaying, one to one instruction, and in vivo procedures were found to be effective teaching techniques. Major benefits and limitations of the study were discussed.

This study examined differences in social self-concept, as measured by the Self-Perception Profile for Children (SPPC), between boys and girls with and without attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) while controlling for internalizing symptoms. Ninety-six children between the ages of 8 and 13 participated in the study as part of a larger project. Teacher reports of social competence were collected using the Teacher Rating Scale (TRS). The results indicated ADHD children experienced more peer rejection than control children. ADHD girls appeared to be more susceptible to low social self-concept and competence than control children or ADHD boys. Inattentive symptoms were most predictive of teacher reports of competence. Positive illusory bias was not found to serve a protective function in children regardless of ADHD status. The implications of the current study and directions for future research are presented.

Children are endowed with agency, a fundamental trait of humanity which is accomplished through collective striving. This striving occurs as children meet, and create, their world and its expectations of them. I explore how one particular 2-year-old child, Emily, encounters her world. The study focuses on Emily’s agency and power as she meets an adult society which extends control into her life. Through Emily’s life, I illustrate how this extension of control creates confined spaces of childhood which infantilize and regulate Emily. The socially constructed childhood Emily encounters denies and ignores much of her agency. Yet, Emily powerfully and irreparably alters the world she meets, generating novel landscapes as she pushes back against the world. Emily refuses to concede to the world presented to her; she instead takes the world and changes it. I use ethnographic, idiographic methods to describe the extension of control into children’s lives as adult imperialism and locate Emily’s powerful agency in her transformative dissent and stance of opposition. Field observations occurred over a nine-month period; interviews were conducted with Emily, her parents, and her teachers. The Transformative Activist Stance, a critical expansion of cultural-historical activity theory outlined by Dr. Anna Stetsenko, is used as an orienting framework. All data was audio recorded, transcribed, and analyzed to offer a convincing argument regarding agency and imperialism in Emily’s life. I argue that Emily’s transformative dissent is the social assertion of her agency and that she, like all children, deserves to be appreciated and celebrated for her capacity to matter in the world-as-it-is-being-made. Social accomplishments are implicated in the research as manifestations of individual agency: Emily matters because of how she engages with others. This research suggests a critical shift away from vertical adult-child relationships, which are presented in the data as defined by regulation and control, and towards horizontal relationships, oriented around recognition and appreciation. A horizontal relationship implies shedding developmental assumptions about children and ceding back to them areas of their own lives.

Studies exploring facial emotion recognition (FER) abilities in autism spectrum disorder (ASD) samples have yielded inconsistent results despite the widely-accepted finding that an impairment in emotion recognition is a core component of ASD. The current study aimed to determine if an FER task featuring both unfamiliar and familiar faces would highlight additional group differences between ASD children and typically developing (TD) children. We tested the two groups of 4- to 8-year-olds on this revised task, and also compared their resting-state brain activity using electroencephalogram (EEG) measurements. As hypothesized, the TD group had significantly higher overall emotion recognition percent scores. In addition, there was a significant interaction effect of group by familiarity, with the ASD group recognizing emotional expressions significantly better in familiar faces than in unfamiliar ones. This finding may be related to the preference of children with autism for people and situations which they are accustomed to. TD children did not demonstrate this pattern, as their recognition scores were approximately the same for familiar faces and unfamiliar ones. No significant group differences existed for EEG alpha power or EEG alpha asymmetry in frontal, central, temporal, parietal, or occipital brain regions. Also, neither of these EEG measurements were strongly correlated with the group FER performances. Further evidence is needed to assess the association between neurophysiological measurements and behavioral symptoms of ASD. The behavioral results of this study provide preliminary evidence that an FER task featuring both familiar and unfamiliar expressions produces a more optimal assessment of emotion recognition ability. / Includes bibliography. / Thesis (M.A.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2017. / FAU Electronic Theses and Dissertations Collection

No description available.