Lesson 4 Social Emotional
Contents
Language is just one component of communication or verbal behavior. If children do not have the desire or motivation to communicate with other people, language becomes a behavior that they “do” for an external reinforcer and does not occur spontaneously with others. In the author’s experience, children who have been instructed in language but without attention paid to the social-emotional basis of communication tend to be rote responders with little spontaneous communication. Many other treatment approaches (i.e. DIR, RDI, SCERTS) focus primarily on social-emotional communication and follow a developmental treatment model. It is this author's opinion that these skills can be operationalized and taught just as any other behavior.
Categories of Communication
The author considers 3 major functions of communication that often encompass numerous verbal operants as described by Skinner.
- Language used to get our needs met: This primarily encompasses mands.
- Language used to share our experience of the world with others and to learn about others: This often encompasses tacts (combined with mands for attention), mands for information and some intraverbals.
- Language used to engage in academic settings: Mands for information, tacts (more in the form of question/answer) and intraverbals (connecting new learning to old learning).
It is the second major function of language that often gets neglected in programming and that is the emphasis of this text.
Referencing for Early Learners
Early Learners
An early learner is defined here as someone who has very little verbal behavior of any form. These children often have very few things that they find reinforcing and are often difficult to engage in play.
Some early skills to teach include:
- Patterns: Exhibiting a behavior to take a role in an interactive pattern. The instructor performs a behavior then the child performs a behavior. The behavior can be the same or different from the instructors. Some examples might include that the adult rolls a ball and the child rolls the ball back, or, the adult hands the child a ball and the child throws the ball. The child is prompted as needed to be successful and reinforcement occurs after the response happens. It is preferable for the reinforcer to be part of the actual activity (ex. the ball flying across the room serves as the reinforcer) so it is important to watch the child closely to determine the reinforcing part of the activity.
- Change of Patterns: Once the child is consistently exhibiting their role in the pattern, change the pattern slightly. We want to avoid the child becoming rigidly attached to doing the activity in exactly the same way each time. For example, if the initial pattern was that the adult handed the child the ball and the child threw the ball, a change might be that the adult throws a ball and then the child throws the ball.
- Non-vocal verbal behavior: We want the child to learn that other people’s body and faces exhibit important communicative behaviors. We want the child to be looking at other people for 3 primary purposes:
- To share affect: Whenever an emotion is present, typically developing babies will look to the adult or caregiver to share the emotion. We want our kiddos to be sharing (i.e. looking at the adult and exhibiting a behavioral manifestation of the emotion) happiness, sadness, anger, or fear. This can be accomplished best by staying on the child’s level, keeping your face close to theirs, exhibiting the emotion yourself and heightening or exaggerating your affect appropriate to the environmental conditions. The goal is for the reinforcement to be the sharing of the emotion itself.
- Looking at the adult when requesting: This can be taught once a mand is mastered by withholding the desired item briefly and bringing it to your face. As soon as the child looks to your face, reinforce. It’s important to not try to teach this until after a mand is fairly fluent.
- Looking at the adult to gain information: Information can be in the form of gestures (pointing, head nods/shakes, eye gaze, and shrugging shoulders) and are an important part of communication. Some suggest that up to 80% of communication happens non-verbally. We need to begin early to teach children to attend and respond to facial expressions, gestures and other forms of non-vocal verbal behavior. Some ways to accomplish this are:
- Once motivation is established for an item, place the item out of the child’s visual field and point to where the item is located. Reinforce by allowing the child access to the item.
- Block access to a reinforcer for which the child has motivation. As soon as the child looks at you, shake your head yes and immediately allow access.
- Play games in which the child is motivated for many items within the activity (ex. puzzles, ball towers etc.). Establish a pattern where you point to the item you want the child to obtain and gradually fade to looking at the item you want the child to obtain next.
- Hide reinforcers and use head nods/shakes, eye gaze, points to direct the child to the location of the item.
When engaging with a child, keep in mind that we always want to be more than just a deliverer of the reinforcer. Yes, we will become paired in this way but we also want to make sure our way of being allows us to BE the reinforcer. Perhaps the most important component of a good instructor/therapist is their consciousness of how their own behavior is affecting the behavior of the child they’re with. It is imperative to stay connected and watch the child to determine how they are responding to our voice, our touch and our interaction.
Think of a triangle and make sure that each interaction includes both you and the object that the child is interacting with. Sometimes objects can get in the way of the interaction between people. If this is true with a particular child, you may want to take objects out of the picture for awhile and interact without them. “People play” types of activities might include, hiding games, tickling games, songs and finger plays…interacting with the child in ways that allows the shared affect and patterning described above to occur for children to tend to hyper focus on objects.
Intermediate Learners
An intermediate learner is defined as a child who has lots of mands, early intraverbals and readily interacts with adults with a wide variety of toys or is motivated by many different activities. While manding and the other non-vocal verbal behaviors identified above are still included in programming, we also begin to expand the tacting in the natural environment. For these children, I do not recommend a great deal of question-answer type of tacts. Consider these tacts to be those that describe what you’re actually experiencing in the environment. Some examples might include: “Wow, that’s a big ball!”, “This soup is hot!” Keep the length of your sentences one step above the child. For example, if the child is primarily using single words, tact using two word phrases: “Big dog!”, “Pretty bird!” Model these tacts for the child during play and use fill-ins to teach the child to tact.
Mands for information can also be taught at this level. Begin mands for information by contriving situations where the child has motivation to receive information. For example, hide a favorite reinforce then prompt “Where + object?” Be sure to reinforce by giving the information for the child to retrieve the item rather than giving the item directly. Once asking for information has been paired with reinforcement, you can begin to create motivation for the child to mand for personal information by setting up conditions where the information is available and reinforcing heavily by asking for it
Example: I went on vacation. Prompt: Where did you go? Reinforce by giving the information paired with social praise for asking. Let the child know it’s important to you that he/she asked and it was a friendly thing to do.
Advanced Learners
Advanced Learners
An advanced learner is one who has many mand and tact and intraverbal responses. At this point, the goal is for the child to learn more about themselves and others…their preferences, their thoughts and to take the perspectives of others into account in what they do and how they behave.
Some activities might include:
- Designing and completing joint projects with adults and/or other children.
- Giving instructions to others for things not visible.
- Listing preferences of foods, toys, activities of themselves and others.
- Identifying conditions that evoke various emotions in themselves and others.
- Discriminating between facts and opinions.
- Responding appropriately when opinions are expressed that are different from their own.
By consciously attending to the social-emotional aspects of communication and human interaction, we can increase the likelihood that children will not only learn the functions of communication but will use their communication skills to build lasting relationships.
Tracy Vail,MS,CCC/SLP
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