Use of social referencing to teach safety skills to adolescents with autism

Document Type

Thesis

College

College of Arts and Sciences

Department

Psychology

Degree

M.S. Applied Behavior Analysis

Date Completed

2021

First Committee Member

MacDonald, Rebecca

Second Committee Member

Henley, Amy

Third Committee Member

Ahearn, William

Abstract

"The purpose of this study was to teach adolescents with autism to use a social referencing chain to discriminate safe and dangerous stimuli in the context of ambiguous safe and dangerous stimuli with multiple exemplars. The procedures were evaluated using a multiple baseline design across participants and multiple probe design across stimuli. Participants were taught a gaze shift response from an item to an experimenter and were taught a "yes" or "no" response contingent on the facial expression of the experimenter. Mastery with three training sets were followed by probes with novel stimuli, across adults, with covered stimuli, and across environments. Both participants acquired social referencing during training, and the skill generalized across novel stimuli, across adults, and with covered stimuli for both participants. One participant showed generalization of the skill across environments. The implications for using prompting and differential reinforcement to teach social referencing are discussed."

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