Effects of social approval on the verbal behavior of emotionally disturbed and normal children.

A group of 96 nondefective children in Grades 4 through 9 who were referred to a child psychiatric clinic were compared with a group of 120 public school children of similar intellectual and educational level in terms of their response to a Taffel-type verbal conditioning procedure. Half of the children in each group were experimental 5s, to whom E said "good" following their use of a first-person pronoun, and half were control 5s, to whom E made no verbal response. Normal experimental 5s showed a statistically significant increase in their usage of the reinforced words, while clinic experimental 5s, as a group, failed to show a significant increase in such usage. Verbal approval was shown to have a differential effect depending on the child's emotional status (normal or disturbed). In neither group did grade level have an effect upon rate of conditioning.