The effect of praise, positive nonverbal response, reprimand, and negative nonverbal response on child compliance: a systematic review.

Lack of compliance has both short- and long-term costs and is a leading reason why parents seek mental health services for children. What parents do to help children comply with directives or rules is an important part of child socialization. The current review examines the relationship between a variety of parenting discipline behaviors (i.e., praise, positive nonverbal response, reprimand, negative nonverbal response) and child compliance. Forty-one studies of children ranging in age from 1½ to 11 years were reviewed. Reprimand and negative nonverbal responses consistently resulted in greater compliance. Praise and positive nonverbal responses resulted in mixed child outcomes. The findings are discussed based on theory and populations studied. The authors propose a mechanism that may increase children's sensitivity to both positive and negative behavioral contingencies.

The association of promised consequences with child compliance to maternal directives.

Noncompliance is a primary reason parents seek services for their young children. Research on socialization suggests that warning children about consequences is associated with greater compliance. In the current study, we test whether promised consequences (i.e., promises of parental responses to subsequent child behavior), compared with directives alone, were more strongly associated with compliance. We also tested whether some types of promised consequences were more strongly associated with compliance than others. Forty White mother-toddler (age 17-36 months) dyads were video recorded in a 30-min behavioral analogue situation. Interactions were coded using a derived coding scheme. Promised consequences were not found to be more strongly associated with compliance than were directives alone using sequential analyses; however, negative and immediate promised consequences were more strongly associated with compliance. Findings suggest that promising negative and immediate consequences for noncompliance may encourage compliance.

The risk of partner aggression research: impact of laboratory couples conflict protocols on participants.

The impact of male-to-female intimate partner violence (IPV) research on participants is unknown. A measure of impact was given to participants in an IPV study to assess systematically the impact of completing questionnaires, engaging in conflict conversations, and being interviewed individually about anger escalation and de-escalation during the conversations. Participants completed a six-question, Likert-scaled impact measure. Both male and female participants rated the impact of the study as helpful to them personally and to their relationships. Female participants rated different segments of the study as more helpful to themselves and their relationships, while male participants did not find any segment of the study to have a different impact than other segments.