Early intervention for female sexual identity disturbance: self-monitoring of play behavior.
This study is the first experimental demonstration of sex-typed play behavior change in a young girl with sexual identity disturbance. The 8-year-old child was treated with a self-monitoring procedure combined with a behavioral prompting technique that was gradually faded out. Self-monitoring in the clinic resulted in a high, stable rate of appropriate sex-typed play, and this effect generalized to a different set of sex-typed toys over time. The treatment effects did not generalize to the home environment. The self-regulation intervention was subsequently adapted to the home setting, resulting in a replication of the treatment effects across settings. After the removal of the self-monitoring interventions, a high level of feminine sex-typed play persisted. Pretreatment, posttreatment, and follow-up psychological testing demonstrated a reversal of a pronounced cross-gender identity to a normal female sexual identity.
D000374:Aggression / Q000523:psychology; D001521:Behavior Therapy / Q000379:methods*; D002648:Child; D005260:Female; D005500:Follow-Up Studies; D005783:Gender Identity; D006801:Humans; D007062:Identification, Psychological; D010988:Play and Playthings; D011581:Psychological Tests