Comparison of attitudes of 60 elementary or middle school students with behavioral disorders and 60 students without BD (all at the elementary or middle school levels) regarding the current and future outcomes of interpersonal interactions found no significant differences between groups regarding positive interactions. However, students with BD…

This article surveys the past 35 years of social interaction research relating to autism. Ways in which understanding social deficits in autism has influenced attempts to analyze and ameliorate problem behaviors are discussed, and emerging concepts relating to social interaction are examined, including the importance of maintaining social…

A 15-lesson social problem-solving training program was developed and implemented with 25 severely disturbed children (ages 7-12). Trained children generated significantly more alternative solutions at posttesting than did matched control youngsters. Gains in the overall number of solutions generated were not accompanied by improvement in the…

With two autistic boys as subjects, a teacher prompt and praise procedure was applied sequentially across dyads composed of a subject and a nonhandicapped peer (n=8, aged 11-12). Following social interaction training with several nonhandicapped peers, one subject showed across-peer and across-setting generalization, while the second subject did…

This study compared scores on several indices of empathy and social competence in 39 adolescent males with behavioral disorders and 39 age-matched peers without behavioral disorders. The adolescents with behavioral disorders reported lower levels of empathy, participated in fewer extracurricular activities, had less frequent contacts with friends,…

Teaching social skills to students with emotional and behavioral disorders (EBD) has become an accepted practice. Literally hundreds of social skills training (SST) efficacy studies for students with EBD appear in the literature. As a result, many authors have published both narrative and meta-analytic reviews of the literature. Reviews have…

Direct observation and sequential analytic techniques were used to analyze rates, antecedents, and predictive sequences of aggressive behavior for 28 elementary school-aged children with emotional/behavioral disorders. Results indicated that low rates of positive social interactions characterized the daily classroom ecology of students displaying…

This article provides an analysis of the current knowledge base of social skills training (SST) with students with, or at risk for, Emotional and Behavioral Disorders (EBD). This knowledge base is evaluated with respect to issues regarding construct, internal, external, and social validity of the SST literature. Research syntheses investigating…