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On July 6, 2015, the Social Development Lab is hosting a Psychology Pupil Conference. Three local schools are bringing their Year 6 classes to take part in a range of psychology activities.

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Alana, Patrick and Dawn will be attending the BPS Developmental conference in Amsterdam. Dawn will be presenting one of her undergraduate projects by Ramona DaCruz, Bethany Elms, Iesha Ginn, and Zehra Saifuddin this year.  The presentation is titled: Children’s recognition of emotion through body language: Is recognition enhanced with cartoon drawings? This presentation will highlight that children’s emotion recognition has traditionally been explored using facial expressions of emotion; however, much information about emotion is conveyed through body language. From local and central London schools, we had 272 children between 6 and 12 years complete an emotion matching task of the six basic emotions (happy, sad, angry, fear, surprise, and disgust), where they matched emotive body posture with facial expressions of emotion. The stimuli were either cartoon drawings or human images (both reflecting the same body posture).

We found that children had better matching ability for the cartoon drawings than human figure, but this was particularly true when matching cartoon body to the cartoon face. We will be discussing the findings with regard to the emergence of emotion recognition skills and the nature of drawings versus human figures.

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New book – Gender and Development – published as part of the Psychology Press Series on “Current Issues in Developmental Psychology”, edited by Patrick Leman and Harriet Tenenbaum.

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A link to a recent pod cast – from the Pod Delusion website – from Patrick Leman speaking at the Royal Holloway Science Festival 2013, talking about ethnicity and science learning in the Slough Science Project.

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The Social Development Lab is  happy to welcome Dr. Alana James as its newest member! Alana will be working on intervention studies that help promote inclusion and positive social relationships.

From left to right: Dr. Alana James, Prof. Patrick Leman, Dr. Dawn Watling, Ben Hine, and Dr. Yvonne Skipper (Absent Nikoleta Damaskinou)

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 Patrick Leman presenting research from the lab’s Ethnicity, Learning and Social Interaction project at an European Association for Research into Learning and Instruction conference in  Belgrade, Serbia, in 2012.

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Ben Hine has been exploring how boys and girls make judgments about prosocial behaviour.

Previous studies have shown that children and adolescents consistently gender-type prosocial behaviour as feminine (Study 1), and that at age 13 boys being prosocial are judged less positively than at other ages (Study 2). Boys will still have a desire to be prosocial, as these behaviours are morally good, and they will know the rules of right and wrong. Furthermore, parents and teachers will encourage good behaviour. However, if prosocial behaviour is female-typed, boys may be discouraged by their peers from performing behaviours that are feminine and therefore incongruent with their gender role. In this sense, boys may have a conflict between being a good boy and being a good example of a boy. How might they resolve this conflict?

These studies may also give insight into how boys are able to be prosocial, despite broad prosocial behaviours and prosocial behaviour, as a term, being labelled as feminine. Boys may identify prosocial behaviours that are masculine in their quality, and perform more of these behaviours to satisfy both social and moral obligations. These results are important, as they highlight how moral behaviours, like prosocial behaviour, are subject to social rules and peer pressures.

Bottom Line

There are masculine and feminine prosocial behaviours

For more information about this study, please email B.Hine@rhul.ac.uk

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Thank you to all the teachers who attended the Slough Schools Science Project mini-conference at Ryvers School on 19 June. Loads of great ideas for our Leverhulme study and future plans…

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A Special Issue of the British Journal of Developmental Psychology, co-edited by Patrick Leman and Harriet Tenenbaum (Kingston University) appeared in May 2011. The issue features a range of papers examining how gender affects relationships in a developmental context, and how these influences also entail certain consequences for children.

There is a podcast to accompany the special issue, and a full list of paper, here: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/10.1111/(ISSN)2044-835X