Assessing and teaching orienting to distress in children with and without autism

Document Type

Thesis

College

College of Arts and Sciences

Department

Psychology

Degree

M.S. Applied Behavior Analysis

Date Completed

2018

First Committee Member

MacDonald, Rebecca

Second Committee Member

Dickson, Chata

Third Committee Member

Thompson, Rachel

Abstract

"The purpose of the current study was twofold. First, differences in children with autism and typically developing children on two social orienting tasks were assessed and analyzed. Second, children who did not demonstrate social orienting were taught using a modification of a protocol developed by Sng and MacDonald (2014). Six toddlers participated, three typically developing children and three children with autism. Results indicated that all children with autism oriented less to social stimuli than typically developing peers. However, only one child with autism showed deficits in attending to distress. This participant was taught to orient to an experimenter during hurt and spill distress conditions using a treatment package consisting of multiple exemplar training, visual prompts, a delayed toy removal procedure, and edible reinforcers. Following training, improvements were seen in performance during post assessments. Findings indicate that for children with autism who show deficits in orienting to distress, the treatment package used can be effective in teaching the skill and improvements in untrained facets of orienting may be observed."

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