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

2020

First Committee Member

MacDonald, Rebecca

Second Committee Member

Henley, Amy

Third Committee Member

Dickson, Chata

Abstract

"The purpose of the study was to teach an adolescent with autism, aged 13, to respond differentially to socially relevant safe and dangerous stimuli using social referencing skills with multiple exemplars. Participants were trained using differential reinforcement and least-to-most prompting to gaze shift from an ambiguous safe or dangerous item, to the experimenter’s face, and to then reach for the item or provide an all done response based upon the experimenter’s facial expression. Following the mastery of 24 safe and dangerous stimuli in training sessions, multiple probe sessions were conducted with stimuli that he had not been exposed to before, stimuli that he could not see, stimuli presented by another adult other than the experimenter, and stimuli in a natural environment. The study employed a multiple probe design across stimuli. The participant acquired social referencing during training, and the skill generalized to untrained items, to covered items, to another adult, and to another setting. The results validate a teaching protocol for teaching social referencing chain to teach individuals with autism to gain safety skills in their natural environment."

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