Commentary: Using Basic Behavior Research on Children's Emotions to Inform Prevention Research: A Commentary on Pooley and Fiddick Social Referencing "Mr. Yuk"

Abstract

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). The article correctly recognizes the need to include young children as targets in poison prevention and control campaigns. Though educating parents to supervise children and store dangerous substances out of reach of young children are critical components to prevent poison ingestion, they are not sufficient at eliminating the risk of unintentional ingestion. Indeed, a large proportion of unintentional injuries and poisonings occur in settings in which parents step away only for a few moments, but are still present in the home (Ozanne-Smith, Day, Parsons, & Dobbin, 2001). Thus, it is important to identify developmentally appropriate strategies to deter children from ingesting dangerous substances, regardless of parental presence. The authors are to be commended for their innovative approach to systematically examine a key feature (i.e., facial expression) of the widely used child poison prevention program, Mr. Yuk stickers. Specially, through a logical series of basic behavioral experiments rooted in empirically supported research methods (Fiddick, 2004; Rozin, Lowery, Imada, & Haidt, 1999), they obtained the