Combating Shyness

A very common form of treatment for behavioural issues, is called cognitive behavioural therapy. This therapy identifies the role of classical and operant conditioning in behaviour and how things like social anxiety is perpetuated. The cognitive behavioural therapy generally identifies the following behaviours:

Belief of anxiety producing situation (“Speeches are scary”)
The situation itself (“I get nervous when i have to give speeches”)
Sensitivity to feeling anxious about the situation (“I am always nervous in this situation”)
The anxiety itself (“I am shaking, my palms are sweaty, and my voice is unsteady”)
The response that reduces the anxiety (“I will not give a speech”)

Think of it in terms of having to make a big speech. Your boss or teacher says someone has to make a speech at an event. You believe the speech giving situation to be particularly stressful. You get chosen to be the one to present. This makes you very nervous, so you call in sick on the day of the speech, and by such means your anxiety goes away because you no longer have to make the speech.

In cognitive behavioural therapy, exposure is used to cause the conditioned response to become extinct. Via a hierarchy of anxiety producing stimuli, people are exposed to the event/situation that causes them to become anxious. This exposure does not allow for the person to participate in the avoidance strategy, and therefore they must remain exposed until their anxiety reduces on its own. Once the anxiety is reduced people generally come to the realization that the feared situation is not the “end of the world” and is something manageable.

Flett, G.L., Kocovski, N.L., Davison, G.C. & Neale, J.N. (2017). /Abnormal Psychology /(6^th Canadian Edition). Toronto: Wiley.

In 2018, Villabø, Narayanan, Compton, Kendall, and Neumer conducted a study with 7-13 year old children who suffered from some form of anxiety disorder. In the study they compared individual and group cognitive behavioural therapies with a waitlisted group.

Looking specifically at children with social anxiety, the group therapy consisted of in-session exposures that required them to introduce themselves to others, and speaking in front of the group. In their everyday lives, these children were given the homework task of practicing speaking in front of others in ways such as reading aloud for classmates or teachers.

The results of the study concluded that 77% of children in the study that met the criteria for social anxiety disorder at the beginning of the study, no longer met the criteria for social anxiety after completing the group cognitive behavioural therapy. Due to the nature of the group therapy compared to the individual therapy, the group therapy was more effective for children with social anxiety.

Villabø, M. A., Narayanan, M., Compton, S. N., Kendall, P. C., & Neumer, S. (2018). Cognitive–behavioral therapy for youth anxiety: An effectiveness evaluation in community practice. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 86(9), 751-764. doi:http://dx.doi.org.cat1.lib.trentu.ca:8080/10.1037/ccp0000326

The main idea of this is not to suggest that if your child is shy that they will develop social anxiety. Most children are shy, it’s something that, for the most part, people grow out of. That being said, if your child is shy you can use the simple concepts of cognitive behavioural therapy to help them combat their shyness. For example, cognitive behavioural therapy uses exposure to help treat social anxiety. The more you expose your children to social situations and get them involved in talking and socializing with others, the more comfortable they will be and therefore the less shy.

Don’t Be Afraid

Fear can be learned by observing others in scary situations. If you think about it, it’s probably a useful ability. If a child is walking through a garden with their parent, and the parent sees a poisonous snake on the path ahead and jumps back or hesitates, or maybe even screams, you would hope that the child would take notice of that and become fearful or at the very least more weary of their surroundings.

In 2017, Dunne and Askew used pictures of faces (expressions) and animals to create observational associations of dangerous versus safe environments.

Children (aged 6-10) were shown faces (either happy or scared) along with a picture of a novel animal. This allowed them to form an association between which animals should be feared and which should not be feared.

Overall, the experiment determined that after having viewed the paired images. Children reported being more afraid and wanting to avoid animals that were previously paired with the scared images. In addition, when then paired with happy faces, the previously scary animals did not elicit the same fear response as before.

Dunne, G., & Askew, C. (2018). Vicarious learning and reduction of fear in children via adult and child models. Emotion, 18(4), 528-535. doi:http://dx.doi.org.cat1.lib.trentu.ca:8080/10.1037/emo0000341

Children are quite fearful. The above study can be used to understand how to counteract children’s fears using yourself as a model for fearless behaviour. A good example of this is going on a plane. If a parent is afraid of flying their child is likely going to be fearful of the experience as well because their mom or dad has demonstrated to them that flying is something to be fearful of. Whereas, a parent who frames the experience of flying as an adventure, or something fun, is more likely to have a child display behaviours consistent with excitement, or contentment.

Making it Happen

Observational Causal Learning is when children (generally aged 2-4) learn new things about their environment based on observing cause-effect relationships.

Waismeyer, A., & Meltzoff, A. N. (2017). Learning to make things happen: Infants’ observational learning of social and physical causal events. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 162, 58-71. doi:http://dx.doi.org.cat1.lib.trentu.ca:8080/10.1016/j.jecp.2017.04.018

In order to demonstrate the ability of infants to display observational learning, Waismeyer and Meltzoff (2017) conducted three experiments that examined infants learning of a physical event, and a social-causal event. In addition they also looked at the ability for infants to learn via observation when the event did not occur every time but instead occurred only a majority of the time (probabilistic cause-effect relationship).

Physical Cause-Effect Relationship

Children observed a model manipulate a marble dispenser. There were two test objects. When the model shook object 1 a marble was dispensed. When the model shook object 2 no marble was dispensed.

On average, children specifically chose to shake object 1, demonstrating that they had learned the cause-effect relationship.

Social Cause-Effect Relationship

Similar to the first experiment however, the marble dispenser was replaced by an adult “dispenser”. When the model shook object 1 the adult presented the model with a marble. When the model shook object 2 the adult did not present the model with a marble.

Children observed this activity played by the model and adult and when it was their turn to “play” were generally successful in choosing the correct object to shake. This means that infants are able to observe interactions between people and make decisions about how to behave and act in social situations.

Probabilistic Causal Relationships

The probabilistic experiment follows the same pattern of the first two experiments. However, when object 1 was shook a marble was only presented a majority of the time.

Children’s observations of probabilistic causality in the physical and social context demonstrated an understanding of the relationship between cause-effect regardless of the frequency to which the shaking of object 1 was reinforced by the presentation of a marble.

Waismeyer, A., & Meltzoff, A. N. (2017). Learning to make things happen: Infants’ observational learning of social and physical causal events. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 162, 58-71. doi:http://dx.doi.org.cat1.lib.trentu.ca:8080/10.1016/j.jecp.2017.04.018

This experiment highlights the importance of social modelling in your household. Children learn behaviours from the manner in which parents and siblings conduct themselves. In this way, children are becoming more independent and use increasingly complex forms of learning in order to decode social cues and learn right from wrong.

Video Games and Learning

We can demonstrate classical conditioning in children via video games. In 2010, Cornejo, Castillo, Saavedra, and Vogel, used a simple video game to demonstrate predictive situations.

The video game worked as followed:

In this new task you will be shown aliens shooting at a cloud. You have to learn WHICH of the aliens CAN and which CANNOT make rain.

Each time an alien appears shooting, you will have to tell whether or not it is going to rain by pressing a key on the computer. There will

immediately appear a cloud with drops of rain or without drops of rain, showing what happened after the shooting. Pay attention to what happens after the shot, since you will be asked about which aliens MAKE RAIN and which aliens DO NOT MAKE RAIN.

PRESS THE SPACE BAR TO CONTINUE.

To make sure that the instructions on the screen were understood, the following instruction appeared:

So, your task consists of learning which aliens MAKE rain and which aliens DO NOT MAKE rain.

To indicate they make rain press key “S” and press key “N” to indicate they won’t make rain.

You should press only ONE key

PRESS THE SPACE-BAR TO CONTINUE

Each different alien was associated with a key on the keyboard (keys A through H).

Training Phase:

Some aliens were paired and some were not.
Aliens A (8 drops), B (8 drops), and EF (8 drops) were followed by rain.
Aliens C, D, and GH were not followed by rain.
At the end of training, children were asked to guess how many drops of rain will follow the shootings of A, B, and AB

Test Phase:

Aliens shown were: A (8 drops), B (8 drops), EF (8 drops), AB (16 drops), C, D, GH, CD.

The results of the test showed that the children were able to discriminate between the aliens that produce rain and the ones that do not produce rain. Also the children had greater predictive value with the combination of AB than predicting A, B, or EF. This game shows that children were processing each individual alien (even those in compounds – 2 aliens at a time).

Cornejo, F. A., Castillo, R. D., Saavedra, M. A., & Vogel, E. H. (2010). Summation in predictive learning in children. Psicológica, 31(2), 199-217.

Eat Your Vegetables

Now that you are familiar with classical conditioning you can use it to “train” your kids to do things like eat their vegetables. But what if they actually liked eating the vegetables? That would make matters even easier.

In 2007, Havermans and Jansen used classical conditioning to pair a neutral vegetable flavour with a preferred vegetable flavour (essentially they added sugar) to increase a five year old child’s preference for the neutral flavour. It would look something like this:

Neutral Flavour (cauliflower) = “it tastes just okay”

Unconditioned Flavour (sugared cauliflower) = “i like it”

cauliflower + sugared cauliflower = “i like it”

cauliflower = “i like it”

The results of the study strongly implied an increase in preference for the vegetable taste that was conditioned compared to the vegetable taste that was not conditioned.

Havermans, R. C., & Jansen, A. (2007). Increasing children’s liking of vegetables through flavour-flavour learning. Appetite, 48(2), 259-262. doi:http://dx.doi.org.cat1.lib.trentu.ca:8080/10.1016/j.appet.2006.08.063

Now, I’m not suggesting that you start adding sugar to all of your kids foods. However, if you try to integrate foods that they do like into foods they do not like, you may be able to convince them that they actually do like broccoli. When first initiating this process, be sure to add more of the food they do like, and slowly with each meal reduce this amount.