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PubMed1992

[The effects of role playing on prosocial behavior in preschool children].

The purpose was to examine the effects of two types of role-playing experience on prosocial behavior in preschool children. Subjects were 72 6-year-olds. In the Empathy role-playing (E), each pair of children enacted alternately a victim and an eyewitness using a glove puppet, in which the emphasis was only on empathizing with the victim. In the Empathy and Helping role-playing (EH), they enacted alternately a victim and a helper, in which the emphasis was on empathizing and helping a victim. In the Control role-playing (C), they played roles alternately of a customer and a salesman in a grocery store. All children were assessed as for helping and sharing behaviors for a real victim before and after the role playing session. In the comparison between pre- and post-tests for helping behavior. All groups (C, E, EH) increased helping tendency, but only in EH group the proportion of subjects, whose attitude changed from helper to non-helper. As for sharing behavior, all three groups increased the number of sharing significantly in the post-test.

Child↗
PubMed1999

[Other perception and play-group entry in a preschoolers class].

Kindergarten children accumulate classmate information through their experience of spending time and doing things together. In the course of preschool lives, a class changes from an aggregation of children to a peer group with own history of interaction and involvement. In such a peer group, whether a child becomes a play-group member is likely to depend not only on his/her social skills, but also on perception based on classmate information, especially whether the other is seen as someone whom the child would like to play with. Relationship between such perception and play-group entry was investigated in a kindergarten class for two years, from entrance as four-year olds to graduation. At the beginning, the two were unrelated, but they became related in later periods. A child was accepted into a play group without trouble when the group members thought he/she was someone they would like to play with. These results supported the hypothesis that other perception based on classmate experience and group history influenced the entry into classroom play groups.

Child, Preschool↗
PubMed1984

Play techniques with neurologically impaired preschoolers.

A pilot project was undertaken to study the effect of educational play as an intervention approach. The study was conducted with 14 neurologically impaired, physically handicapped preschool children, parents, community teachers, and developmental center staff. Educational play consisted of art and drama group activities presented according to the normal sequence of play development, from sensorimotor, to symbolic, to sociodramatic play. After a 7-week course of intervention, the children's performance, as measured by items in the Vulpe Assessment Battery, improved in six areas of development. Overall improvement was statistically significant. In addition, participating adults began to value the use of play as an essential component of child development. Results suggest the need for a systematic study of play in intervention with preschool, neurologically impaired, and physically handicapped children.

Child↗
PubMed1998

Orchestration of work and play within families.

OBJECTIVES: Parental occupations within families include parents' participation in household work and in play with their children. This study explored the nature of parents' play with their preschool-aged children and how it was orchestrated within their daily occupations. METHOD: Participant observations and intensive interviews were conducted with 10 families with preschool-aged children. Data were analyzed with a grounded theory approach. RESULTS: Parents used two types of strategies to orchestrate work and play in their families: Strategies of segregation resulted in play interspersed with household work, and strategies of inclusion resulted in play embedded in household work. CONCLUSION: This study identified the process of occupational scaffolding through which parents foster their children's competence as adults; the need for deconstruction of the notion of work and play as separate experiences; and new ideas to guide occupational therapy practice with parents who are juggling paid work, household work, and time with their children.

Adult↗
PubMed1975

Development of cooperative and competitive play responses in developmentally disabled children.

A behavior management procedure for training cooperative and competitive social play was investigated. Subjects were 5 EMR children who had marked behavior and communication disorders. Baseline data indicated that the subjects exhibited no competitive responses and low levels of cooperative play. Upon instituting a token-praise-feedback procedure, the experimenters observed increases in cooperative play as well as small increases in competitive play. Reinstating the token-feedback procedure after reversal resulted in high levels of competitive play with no change in cooperative play. Several explanations were offered to account for these results.

Child↗
PubMed1985

[Play, an indicator of the health of children].

Africans attach much importance to the fact that their children like to play. A child who is not hungry and refuses to play is not in good health. When a sick child wants to play again one can be sure that his health is improving. Thus, play can be a health indicator and can help to form a diagnosis. Moreover, the way the child plays is a mental health indicator. During games one can distinguish the leaders who are mentally well-balanced, those who try to cheat and who must be carefully watched, and those who are shy and withdrawn. The latter will have difficulties in adapting to a normal social life. The author also discusses what games can be put in the hands of children and rejects all arms such as rifles, guns, pistols or tanks. He ends by recalling that article 7 of the Rights of Children specifies that children must be given every opportunity to play and that games should have an educational value.

Child↗
PubMed1977

Sex differences in parent-infant interaction during free play, departure, and separation.

20 18-month-olds were observed with their mothers and 20 with their fathers in laboratory free-play, departure, and separation situations. Parent and infant behaviors were allowed to vary naturally. Although there were no parent sex or infant sex differences in infants' free-play behavior, there were parent sex X infant sex differences in parental free-play behaviors. Parents talked to, sat on the floor more with, and tended to share play more with same-sexed than opposite-sexed infants, and the patterning of free-play behaviors was different for mothers and fathers. During departure, fathers talked to the infants more than mothers. Infants were more distressed in the absence of same-sexed than opposite-sexed parents. There were infant sex X parent sex differences in the relationships between separation distress and parental free-play and departure behaviors. The implications of these findings for understanding differential roles of mothers and fathers, the development of sex differences, and the determinants of separation distress are discussed.

Father-Child Relations↗
PubMed1978

Improving free play skills of severely retarded children.

Severely and profoundly retarded children are usually deficient in play skills. Since play facilitates socialization, language, and motor development, it is a vitally improtant skill to acquire. This pilot study examined the effects of a behavioral training program on the autistic, independent, and social types of play of four severely and profoundly retarded children. The training program involved the use of instructions, modeling, physical guidance, and verbal reinforcement. Results indicated that a marked increase in independent and social play occurred with the introduction of the training program with all four children. Occupational therapists can play an increasingly important role in helping educators formulate relevant educational programs for severely retarded children, particularly in the areas of play and motor skill development.

Behavior Therapy↗
PubMed1981

"A change of pace": an investigation of the salience of maternal temporal style in mother-infant play.

The salience of maternal temporal style of playful stimulation to 3- and 5-month-old infants during free play was investigated. 32 mother-infant dyads were videotaped for 8 min of interaction which consisted of 4 2-min phases of differing maternal temporal styles: natural (usual), slower-than-usual, return-to-usual, and faster-than-usual temporal styles. Multivariate analyses revealed that changes in the pacing of playful stimulation significantly affected several infant, maternal, and interactive variables. For both the 3- and 5-month-olds, the initial phase of natural temporal style emerged as the period of most positive interactions, and the faster play phase included more positive behaviors than the slower play phase. While most maternal behaviors were very similar in the 2 phases of natural temporal style, infant and some interactive variables failed to demonstrate a return-to-baseline effect. Patterns of differential responding suggested the contributions of possible sequencing effects, infant temporal estimation capacities, and expectancies for the appropriateness of pacing in playful exchanges.

Awareness↗
PubMedDate not supplied

[A comparison of the dynamic speech indices and traditional autonomic correlates of emotions in 9- to 10-year-old children during play].

Emotional state of children aged 9-10 was studied during computer play: 1) under conditions of free choice of individual strategy, 2) time deficit, and 3) after demonstration of techniques of play without limitation in time. Prior and during the play the following parameters were recorded: heart rate, galvanic skin response, frequency of basic tone and evaluation of the first formant frequency of the vowel "a" in the word "da" pronounced by the child during the play in response to acoustic signal; time of speech reaction to acoustic signal, parameters of playing activity, and spontaneous verbal expressions of children. Analysis and comparison of the obtained data allowed us to characterize specific features of interaction of motivational, emotional, and cognitive processes under different playing conditions.

Autonomic Nervous System↗
PubMed1993

Playing and therapeutic action in child analysis.

From its inception, child psychoanalysis has used fantasy play as a window to both the content and process of children's inner worlds. Because of the link to action and primary process, young children's imaginary play is rich in symbolic expressions that facilitate analytic interpretive interventions addressing the conflicts impeding development. There are inevitable tensions between allowing play to emerge as a therapeutic process in its own right and the usual psychoanalytic emphasis on clarification, verbalisation and, above all, interpretation within and about the transference. For many children, the very act of playing carries much of the therapeutic work aimed toward facilitating their return to developmentally appropriate and adaptive psychic functioning. The mobilisation of capacities for play in the analysis allows children to do what is needed for their development to continue and makes use of the developmentally restorative functions of play in the service of therapeutic action.

Adolescent↗
PubMed1993

Pretend play skills and the child's theory of mind.

Pretend play has recently been of great interest to researchers studying children's understanding of the mind. One reason for this interest is that pretense seems to require many of the same skills as mental state understanding, and these skills seem to emerge precociously in pretense. Pretend play might be a zone of proximal development, an activity in which children operate at a cognitive level higher than they operate at in nonpretense situations. Alternatively, pretend play might be fool's gold, in that it might appear to be more sophisticated than it really is. This paper first discusses what pretend play is. It then investigates whether pretend play is an area of advanced understanding with reference to 3 skills that are implicated in both pretend play and a theory of mind: the ability to represent one object as two things at once, the ability to see one object as representing another, and the ability to represent mental representations.

Child, Preschool↗
PubMed2004

Play in orphanages.

OBJECTIVES: This paper attempts to validate the programme of structured play lasting 90 minutes a day, for use in orphanages, to check if it can be replicated in other orphanages, with similar results. METHODS: A 2-week workshop on the structured play scheme was conducted at the Missionaries of Charity Orphanage in Delhi, the venue of the original project. 15 MOC sisters from 6 centers attended the workshop. The authors selected the MOC orphanage at Chandigarh to track the benefits of the programme. The development quotient of all the residents between the ages of 6 months - 3 years was assessed by a pediatric-clinical-psychologist using the Development Assessment Scale for Indian Infants (DAS II) scale. A reassessment of all these children was done again 3 months after initiating the programme of structured play here. RESULTS: The mean motor and mental scores at the orphanage in Chandigarh before the start of the intervention were 57.9 and 58.2 respectively. Post intervention assessments showed a rise of 23 points in both the scores. CONCLUSION: The development of children in orphanages rises dramatically after initiating a programme of play. The pre-intervention development scores is similar to that in a pilot study and the benefits after play was also similar. The play programme can be easily replicated in other orphanages with similar results.

Caregivers↗
PubMed1989

Postural kinematics of trumpet playing.

This paper examines the effects of anthropometry on body posture of trumpeters playing in standing position. Sixteen virtuosi trumpeters were photographed while hitting three notes (low C, high F and high F sustained) during performance of musical tasks. Initial standing posture and anthropometric data were recorded. Six body segment angles were computed and a vectorial sum was obtained to describe whole body posture in neutral and playing conditions. Horn angle and dental overbite were also computed. Earlier results showed that the musical task has no effect on playing posture. One-way ANOVA showed notable differences between the neutral posture and the note-related playing postures. A multiple regression model showed that in addition to the note effect, anthropometric variables, mainly neck length, explain the changes in playing posture. Horn angle is determined by the dental overbite. The importance of the anthropometric variables in playing the more demanding notes indicate that anthropometry may act to constrain trumpeters' performance.

Adult↗
PubMed1987

Juvenile play in the rat: thalamic and brain stem involvement.

Discrete electrolytic lesions of the parafascicular area of the thalamus (PFA) or posterior thalamic area (TP) reduced the frequency of pinning, an indicator variable for rough-and-tumble play in juvenile rats, while largely sparing motivation to play. Similar sized lesions placed within the ventrobasal thalamic area (VBT) had minimal effects on both pinning and measures of play solicitation. Lesions placed within the ventrolateral aspect of the brain stem also markedly reduced pinning, while having no effect on indices of play motivation. Although tests designed to assess the extent to which the observed play deficits may be attributable to a loss of somatic acuity proved inconclusive, the overall pattern of results were not inconsistent with positing a role for these neural areas in relaying somatic stimuli relating to playful intent.

Age Factors↗
PubMed1991

Prenatal stress feminizes juvenile play patterns in male rats.

Sexually dimorphic rough-and-tumble play patterns were compared in male and female rats derived from control mothers and mothers stressed from days 14-21 of pregnancy. Animals were weaned into groups of 8 consisting of 2 males and 2 females from each treatment. Play in the home cage was recorded at 25, 28, 31, 34, 37 and 45 days of age and was most intense on day 31. The overall level of play was significantly higher in control males than in females or stressed males. Control males showed higher levels of the pinning component of rough-and-tumble play than females or stressed males. No play partner preferences were detected in any group. In adulthood, a higher percentage of stressed than control males displayed the female lordotic pattern. No deficits in ejaculatory behavior occurred in the stressed males. Since maternal stress alters patterns of plasma testosterone in male fetuses, the data suggest that the sexual differentiation of social play begins during prenatal ontogeny in the rat. The present results show that sexually dimorphic behaviors displayed before puberty are incompletely masculinized in prenatally stressed males, a finding similar to that reported for a number of adult behaviors.

Animals↗
PubMedDate not supplied

Uses of vision by rats in play fighting and other close-quarter social interactions.

Enucleated juvenile rats were compared to sighted juveniles, and tested over six trials. In some of these trials, the vibrissae were clipped and the test chamber was flooded with white noise. Even though the enucleated rats played, they did so in an atypical manner. They tended to initiate more playful and other social contacts, and were more likely to defend themselves if contacted. When they did defend themselves, they adopted behavior patterns that were more likely to evade the partner's attack. In addition, the enucleated rats were hypersensitive to the partner, being more likely to respond defensively when contacted further from the nape (the main play target). All these changes in play fighting by nonsighted rats suggest that the loss of vision leads to motivational changes in activity and reactivity, and so has an indirect effect on play behavior. In addition, direct evidence is also provided to show that vision is used to orient attacks to the nape. When the vibrissae were closely clipped, the sighted rats continued to make direct attacks on the partner's napes, whereas the nonsighted rats did not. Rather, they first contacted some other part of the partner's body and then oriented to the nape. Another test paradigm was used to determine whether vision is used to trigger defensive responses. The rats were partially food deprived as adults and were filmed in a food wrenching and dodging situation where one rat was given a food pellet and the other allowed to steal it. Measurement of the distance at initiation of the lateral swerve away from the approaching partner (i.e., dodge) showed that when the vibrissae are clipped, the sighted rats continued to initiate dodges at the same distance, whereas the nonsighted rats could not. Therefore, vision appears to have an active role in organizing movement sequences of attack and defense in play fighting and other close-quarter interactions.

Aggression↗
PubMed2006

Prefrontal cerebral blood volume patterns while playing video games--a near-infrared spectroscopy study.

Video game playing is an attractive form of entertainment among school-age children. Although this activity reportedly has many adverse effects on child development, these effects remain controversial. To investigate the effect of video game playing on regional cerebral blood volume, we measured cerebral hemoglobin concentrations using near-infrared spectroscopy in 12 normal volunteers consisting of six children and six adults. A Hitachi Optical Topography system was used to measure hemoglobin changes. For all subjects, the video game Donkey Kong was played on a Game Boy device. After spectroscopic probes were positioned on the scalp near the target brain regions, the participants were asked to play the game for nine periods of 15s each, with 15-s rest intervals between these task periods. Significant increases in bilateral prefrontal total-hemoglobin concentrations were observed in four of the adults during video game playing. On the other hand, significant decreases in bilateral prefrontal total-hemoglobin concentrations were seen in two of the children. A significant positive correlation between mean oxy-hemoglobin changes in the prefrontal region and those in the bilateral motor cortex area was seen in adults. Playing video games gave rise to dynamic changes in cerebral blood volume in both age groups, while the difference in the prefrontal oxygenation patterns suggested an age-dependent utilization of different neural circuits during video game tasks.

Adult↗