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Child Dental Fear, Communication and Cooperation

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Pediatric Dentistry

Part of the book series: Textbooks in Contemporary Dentistry ((TECD))

Abstract

Dentists who provide care to children often face patients who are uncooperative in the dental situation. This chapter reviews the most common causes for uncooperative behavior and dental fear (including classical conditioning, social learning theory, cognitive bases of dental fear, helplessness, and loss of control), as well as more recent understandings of how genetics, family stressors, parenting styles, and other parental factors are related to child fear and uncooperative behavior. The chapter also describes the most common ways of measuring dental fear and uncooperative behavior, the importance of pain in the etiology of dental fear, and the relationships between verbal and nonverbal aspects of dentist-patient communication and how these may help both to reduce dental fear and increase children’s cooperation. Attention is also paid to how dentists may best work with adolescents’ developmental needs for increased autonomy in the dental setting.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Oral Health Sciences, University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA

    Trilby Coolidge

  2. Department of Paediatric Dentistry, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Thessaloniki, Greece

    Nikolaos Kotsanos

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  1. Trilby Coolidge
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  2. Nikolaos Kotsanos
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Correspondence to Trilby Coolidge .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Paediatric Dentistry, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Thessaloniki, Greece

    Nikolaos Kotsanos

  2. Department of Pediatric Dentistry, School of Dental Medicine, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, Israel

    Haim Sarnat

  3. Institute of Oral Health Science, Samsung Medical Center, School of Medicine Sungkyunkwan University, Seoul, Korea (Republic of)

    Kitae Park

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Coolidge, T., Kotsanos, N. (2022). Child Dental Fear, Communication and Cooperation. In: Kotsanos, N., Sarnat, H., Park, K. (eds) Pediatric Dentistry. Textbooks in Contemporary Dentistry. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-78003-6_4

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