Surkes, Jean Kathleen2025-07-032025-07-031980https://hdl.handle.net/1828/22456This study was designed to explore patterns of generalization between imitative affection and aggression, between verbal and motoric forms of expressing affection and aggression, and to compare the rates of acquisition and extinction for verbal and motoric imitative affection and aggression among young children. Four groups of seven year old boys and girls were trained (with continuous reinforcement) to imitate one of the following classes of behaviour: physical affection, physical aggression, verbal affection or verbal aggression directed towards a stuffed "Mickey Mouse.'' Following training, probes for generalization to the other three classes of (non-trained) behaviours were introduced. Throughout this generalization phase which closely approximated the typical generalized imitation paradigm, continuous reinforcement of training behaviour imitation was maintained at a ratio of one training behaviour presentation to every one probe presentation. The children were then subjected to a two phase extinction procedure: massed training behaviour extinction trials (zero reinforcement) followed by presentations of all four classes of modelled stimuli with continued non- reinforcement for training behaviour imitation (pseudo-generalization). No significant group by sex interactions, nor main effects for sex were found in any phase of the study. Also, no significant main effects for groups were found in the acquisition of verbal or motoric imitative affection or aggression, nor in the rate of training behaviour imitation throughout the generalization phase. During extinction, however, the group trained in physical aggression showed a higher rate of training behaviour imitation than did any of the other three groups, during both massed training behaviour extinction trials and the subsequent presentation of all four classes of modelled stimuli. The extinction data were subjected to three separate analyses and while the physical aggression group showed a significantly higher rate of imitation than each of the other three groups in at least one of the two analyses based on the massed extinction data, the main effect for groups fell just short of significance in the analysis of the training behaviour data from the pseudo-generalization phase. To facilitate examination of the patterns of generalization, the three probes for each group were redefined as generalization across emotion (EG), generalization across mode (MG), and generalization across both (EMG). In the traditional generalization phase, significant differences in frequency of probe imitations were found between all pairs of probes in the following order: EG>MG>EMG. In the analyses for group differences, the group trained in physical aggression showed significantly less generalization across emotion than did any of the other three groups. No significant differences were found among the groups in frequency of MG or EMG. In the pseudo- generalization phase during extinction, most subjects had ceased imitating any of the probes and thus, there was no longer any difference across the probes in their frequency of imitation. However, the group trained in physical affection showed a higher rate of EG than did any of the other groups, the differences being significant in two of the three between-group comparisons. Again, there were no significant group differences in MG or EMG. The results of this study support previous research showing that within modal generalization occurs more frequently than cross modal generalization even when the latter is between physical and verbal expressions of the same emotion. The results also indicate that the patterns of generalization between affection and aggression are not necessarily reciprocal; i.e., there was a high frequency of generalization from physical affection to physical aggression but relatively little generalization in the reverse direction. And finally, while no differences were observed among the four classes of behaviour during acquisition, physical aggression was found to have the highest rate of imitation during extinction, both as a training behaviour and as a probe.enAvailable to the World Wide WebThesis