Commentary: Using basic behavior research on children's emotions to inform prevention research: a commentary on Pooley and Fiddick Social referencing 'Mr. Yuk'.

摘要

Pooley and Fiddick (see this issue of the Journal of Pediatric Psychology) recently reported on the outcomes of a series of developmental experiments. The primary purpose of the research was to investigate whether young children associate feelings of disgust with poison ingestion as a means of evaluating the developmental appropriateness of the facial expression depicted on "Mr. Yuk" stickers, a long-standing and widely used poison prevention program (Children's Hospital of Pittsburgh, 2008). The article addresses an important concept in pediatric psychology, which is the prevention of unintentional injury or death among young children (Tercyak, 2008). Unintentional ingestion of poison accounts for >99% of poison exposure among children under the age of 6 years, with children under the age of 4 years comprising nearly half of all calls to poison centers (Litovitz, White, & Watson, 2005).