Category: Publication announcement

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Dr Beatrice Hayes has published her first research paper from her PhD thesis (!), alongside her supervision team Prof Ravinder Barn, Dr Alana James, and Prof Dawn Watling.

Despite the age restrictions of social networking sites (e.g., Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat) typically comprising 13 years, younger children are creating profiles and interacting online. We often hear about the dangers of such use via the media and, indeed, children’s use of social networking sites presents many risks. However, there are also many benefits such as strengthen pre-existing friendships online, making new friends and enhancing self-esteem via positive online feedback. We also know that parents and teachers play an important role in children’s lives and are very influential in how children behave online as well as how they perceive the risks and benefits of social networking site use. To explore this, we interviewed 13 parents, 14 teachers and 15 children across the United Kingdom to find out what they perceived the risks and benefits of social networking site use to be.

We discovered that parents’ and teachers’ perceptions of social networking site use shaped children’s own perceptions and subsequently how they manage their online behaviour. In particular, despite parents and teachers outlining the benefits of strengthening relationships with friends and family online, all of our adult participants identified stranger danger as a risk of children’s social networking site use. Children echoed this perception and were keen to explain how they protected themselves from strangers online. However, children were less knowledgeable about the more day-to-day risks, such as falling out with friends or cyberbullying. Importantly, our paper calls for a more balanced approach to educating children about the online risks and benefits. Of course, children require protection from strangers online, however, children require a stronger understanding of the more “realistic” online risks as well as the many social benefits available to them. We argue that a balanced approach to educating children about their social networking site use is important for empowering children within a digital world.

Read the full article in the British Journal of Educational Psychology: https://doi.org/10.1111/bjep.12452

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Dr Alana James discusses how cross-age mentoring, can be used as a way of supporting the transition into University.  This blog has recently been published on the Higher Education Academy website and can be accessed here; https://www.heacademy.ac.uk/using-mentoring-support-transition-and-out-higher-education

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A Special Issue of Laterality: Assymettries of Body, Brain, and Cognition, co-edited by Victoria Bourne, Dawn Watling and Lance Workman (Bath Spa University) appeared in June 2012. The issue features a range of papers exploring emotion lateralisation through the lifespan, and includes review paper on the topic.

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Banerjee, R., Watling, D., and Caputi, M. (In Press). Peer relations and the understanding of faux pas: Longitudinal evidence for bidirectional associations. Child Development.

Peer rejection and social understanding:  A vicious cycle

Many research studies over the last twenty-five years have helped us to trace children’s development of social understanding, particularly how they come to make sense of people’s behavior in terms of their thoughts and feelings.  But, surprisingly, we do not yet know much about how this kind of social understanding maps on to the relationships children have within their peer groups.  This study is the first to provide strong evidence of a vicious cycle whereby early peer rejection seems to make it harder for children to develop a mature understanding of complex social situations, which in turn makes it likely that the children end up becoming more rejected.

We worked with one group of children aged 5-6 years old and one group of children aged 8-9 years old, and followed them over three school years.  Once a year, children completed a measure of one aspect of social understanding – the understanding of situations where one person commits a faux pas (unintentionally insults another person) – as well as a survey that helped us gauge the extent to which each child was rejected within his or her class at school. By focusing on the characteristics of each individual child, we were able to see how early differences in peer rejection (at ages 7 and 8 years) predicted poorer later social understanding (at age 9 and 10 years).  Furthermore, this analysis helped us see how those who still struggled with the social understanding task at age 10 ended up with higher levels of peer rejection at age 11.

These findings were consistent with our expectations that being rejected by one’s peers makes it much harder to learn about the more subtle aspects of social interaction.  And in turn, failure to develop this kind of sophisticated understanding can ultimately lead to even more rejection.  These findings are important because they extend our theoretical understanding of children’s social reasoning.  Adding to some existing work showing the importance of the family context, our study highlights the importance of children’s peer relations in the development of social understanding.

From a practical point of view, too, these results can help us develop strategies for supporting children who are socially rejected at school.  Increasingly, educational programs are being designed to support ‘social and emotional learning’, and the evidence from our study suggests that work which improves children’s understanding of commonplace social events (such as unintentional insults) could be of great importance in helping rejected children to develop more positive relationships with their peers.

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Leman, P.J., Björnberg, M (2010).   Conversation, development, and gender: A study of changes in children’s concepts of punishment .  Child Development, 81, 958-972.

When children speak together, they learn together – often developing more quickly than when a child learns alone.  In the present study, 9 year old children discussed what would be a fair or unfair punishment. Both immediately and 8 weeks after these discussions, children made more mature judgments about fairness, but the content of conversations and the influence of gender on conversation dynamics had no influence on this development. This finding suggests that peer conversations can promote moral development, but largely because they stimulate children to reflect on a topic after the conversation is over.

Participants were 133 boys and girls from Berkshire, UK, who were individually read a series of scenarios or stories which each showed a child doing something wrong, and then asked the participants to judge which of two punishments was fairest. In each story, a less advanced option (expiatory punishment, where fairness depends on the harshness of the punishment) contrasted with a more advanced option (reciprocity, where a fair punishment puts right the wrong-doing). Some children who had given contrasting answers then discussed the topic in same sex (all boy or all girl) or mixed (girl-boy) pairs. Children were asked to make judgments again, 8 weeks after the initial discussions.

Children’s conversation dynamics were strongly affected by gender. Boys used more negative interruptions than girls, and there was a particularly high level of interruption in all-boy conversations. However, children modified their behavior in terms of the gender of the child they were talking to; most noticeably, boys reduced the amount of negative and positive interruptions they used when they spoke with a girl, compared with speaking to another boy. However, none of these factors affected the outcomes of conversation (which punishment the children chose together) or longer term changes in judgments. The content of conversations (the justifications and explanations children used to advance or defend their initial positions) also did not link to developmental changes. Having a conversation seemed to stimulate global advances in judgments about punishments, rather than promoting thinking about only one, specific scenario.

The study has implications for our understanding of how and why peer interaction leads to development and learning. It will inform programs for promoting moral development because the findings suggest that merely discussing a topic – even if that discussion is conflictual or does not explore “good” or effective arguments – can lead to changes in judgment. Moreover, at 9 years children are well aware of their own and others’ gender, and how this may influence conversation dynamics. Children can adjust their conversation styles to reflect this gender knowledge. Thus interaction in same sex and mixed pairings can be equally effective, at least in terms of outcomes for this moral judgment task.

The research was conducted by Patrick J. Leman (Royal Holloway, University of London) and Marina Björnberg (Linköping University, Sweden). It was funded by a British Academy Senior Research Fellowship to Dr Leman.