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Contingent Maternal Attention As Determinant Of Infant's Protest Responses In Dark And Light Contexts, Aida Isabel Sanchez

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

When infants confront darkness, a context many consider to be aversive and to elicit fear responses, their protests are often taken to denote fear of the dark. A functional analysis using the operant-learning paradigm was conducted of the role of contingent versus noncontingent maternal attention on protests when confronting darkness, in each of 10 human infants. In the laboratory, each mother served as interactor, her behaviors prompted by the experimenter. Identified were the controlling antecedents and consequences that shape and maintain infants' protests in darkness, and under an illuminated control condition. For every one of the 10 single-within subject designs, …