The present study examined effects of pivotal response treatments (PRT) on the shaping of social interactions between college students and children with autistic disorders. After college students (n= ...4) were taught pivotal response treatment strategies by instruction, modeling, role-playing, and performance feedback, effects of that training on the paired interaction of those students with children with autistic disorders were evaluated. The target behavior included the child's social behavior (interaction and initiation) and the college student's behavior that was relevant to the pivotal response treatment. The results indicated an increase in interactions in 3 of the 4 pairs. However, despite that observed increase, the autistic children's initiation behavior did not change from baseline. Training issues relating to pivotal response treatment were discussed in the context of the results of the present study.
The purpose of the present study was to examine the effectiveness of stimulus equivalence procedures for teaching 4 receptive emotional labels (happiness, anger, sadness, and surprise) to a 5-year ...9-month-old girl with autistic disorder. Training programs were designed to teach the girl to match schematic expressive faces to printed emotional labels and to match cartoons depicting emotional situations to schematic faces. After both matching tasks met the learning criteria, she showed unreinforced conditional relations between the printed emotional labels and the emotional situation cartoons, indicating the emergence of stimulus equivalence classes. In addition, the results demonstrated expansion of the equivalence classes to photographs of expressive faces and sentences describing emotion-eliciting situations.
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