Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Initiating Conversation By A Kindergarten-Aged Child With Autism Spectrum Disorder, Eliana A. Segal

Senior Honors Projects, 2010-2019

Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) have social skill deficits that are often manifested in a failure to achieve normal back-and-forth conversation. They rarely initiate social interactions and often show little responsiveness to others. This can extinguish the social initiations of their peers, leading to great difficulty making friends. The purpose of the present study was to teach a child with ASD at an inter-professional autism clinic how to initiate and reciprocate a social conversation. A prompt fading procedure was implemented during training sessions to build a set of social skills into the child’s repertoire. The intervention provided social attention …

The Influence Of Person Familiarity On Children's Social Information Processing, Andrew J. Cummings

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

This study examined the influence person familiarity has on children's social information processing (SIP) choices and emotion recognition. Children in grades 2nd through 5th watch a videotaped expression of a familiar or unfamiliar individual while listening to a hypothetical social interaction. Following the video clip, children responded to open-ended questions and prompted questions designed to assess their strategies and goals in the social interaction. Children also selected from two choices (either `on purpose' or `by accident') for their attribution of the individual's intent. Last, children identified the emotion that they believed the individual in the video was experiencing the most. …

Negative Behavior Exhibited By Preschool Children In Same-Age Versus Mixed-Age Groups, Laura Janine Sheppard

Dissertations and Theses

Perhaps due to the increase in the workforce of mothers with young children, much attention has been directed in the past decade towards the subject of out-of-home child care.

In order to gain further understanding of the socialization of preschool children, an observational study was carried out which was designed to measure the amount of negative behavior expressed by children participating in mixed-age versus same-age preschool groups.