A signal detection approach to social perception: identification of negative and positive behaviors by parents of normal and problem children.

The present experiment was designed to investigate differences in the perception of social behavior between parents of normal and problem children and to relate these differences to behavior observed in the home environment. Subjects were brought into the laboratory and asked to identify positive and negative behaviors on a written script portraying family interactions. Correct and incorrect responses were analyzed using signal detection procedures to produce measures of sensitivity and response bias for positive and negative behaviors. These analyses revealed that parents of normal children were better able to discriminate positive behavior than were parents of problem children. Correlations between these responses and data obtained for a subset of the subjects from 1-hour home observations, using a newly developed home observational coding system, revealed a number of relationships between these sets of variables.