Research has found that individuals present themselves in a self-enhancing fashion when audiences lack information that could contradict their claims. To examine reactions to evaluations and the potential interplay between the valence of the evaluation, the public versus private nature of the response, and the audience to whom a public response is…

This research study investigated the hypothesis that noncontingent social stimulation can elicit infant vocal sounds. The investigation involved an examination of both the course of social elicitation and the nature of the social releasing stimulus. Three experimental conditions were designed to measure: (1) the changes in vocalization rate during…

After acquiescing to a small initial request, people typically are more susceptible to a later call for assistance. This foot-in-the-door phenomenon was examined based on principles of social reinforcement. In Experiment 1, subjects induced to perform the same initial prosocial behaviors were found to be differentially susceptible to a later…

This study investigated the effects of four factors (threat, surveillance, sex of child and time) on obedience of children to adult requests. An adult told the subjects (48 4-year-old boys and girls) to carry marbles from one box to another. The adult either made no threat or threatened the child for possible disobedience, and either stayed in the…

This study investigated the effect of being imitated on the behavior of preschool children. Twenty-two children were employed in a "marble game," which consisted of dropping a marble into one of three holes in a wooden box. Procedure trials occurred across four phases in an ABAB design: baseline, imitation, reversal, and imitation again. During…

Using a developmental model, the author explains a hierarchy which describes how a young child learns to respond to various types of environmental stimuli and discusses some educational consequences of a reinforcement stimuli deficit. Development is seen to take place in succession beginning with the primary level, proceeding to the social,…

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of being imitated on behaviors of preschool children. Each of 24 subjects was given a choice of three responses in a marble-dropping task and was required to make one choice, after which an experimenter either imitated or did not imitate a subject's behavior. The results indicated that when a…

Internal-external control is an important individual differences variable that was introduced in a systematic series of social learning studies by Rotter. The I-E dimension refers to the degree to which people view themselves as responsible for the occurrence or lack of occurrence of reinforcement (internals), as opposed to viewing luck, fate,…

This paper develops a stimulus selection theory, based on an extensive review of previous research, which gives weight to context change or stimulus generalization decrement. The theory assumes no special compounding or configurational process, and accounts for the learning of successive discriminations without the addition of any special process.…

In this study, the effects of rewards on same-different judgments of size, color, and weight were investigated. Subjects were 45 children at the kindergarten and first-grade level. The children were assigned to one of three conditions: (1) rewarded for reporting black in the identification of the colors of balls contained inside gray jars, (2)…

The effects of different schedules of noncontingent reward on subsequent learning in children were investigated. In the first phase of the experiment subjects performed a block-design matching task and received one of three schedules of noncontingent reward, i.e., continuous reward (Group CRF), random reward on 50% of the trials (Group 50R), or no…

This study investigated the effects of delay of reinforcement on the classroom academic behaviors (rate of increase and accuracy of mathematical problem completion) by elementary students. A total of 11 fourth graders with a history of low achievement in arithmetic were divided into two groups and given timed arithmetic tests daily. Three…

The major objective of this study was to explore how preschool children's ability to delay gratification was affected when children were asked to attend to actual rewards rather than pictures of rewards. Sixty subjects, 3 to 5 years of age, were given a choice between two rewards and then placed in a delay of gratification situation. Half of the…

Acquiescence, the tendency to respond affirmatively regardless of the content of a question, was examined in 57 mentally retarded children (11 to 17 years old) and 91 nonretarded children (3 to 8 years old). Embedded within the standard interview schedule for both samples were two pairs of oppositely worded questions on the same topic.…

Cognitive processes, particularly in regard to negative content schemata, seem to play an instrumental role in the development and maintenance of depression. In order to better understand the nature of negative schemata in depressed individuals, both depressed and nondepressed subjects participated in two studies in which they were required to…