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.
News
Social Development Lab welcomes new member!
The Soci
al 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)
Learning and diversity conference, Belgrade Serbia
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.
A novel way to boost personal skills
Dr Yvonne Skipper discussed the “Too Many Cooks” collaborative writing project that can help boost young people’s self-esteem and improve core skills such as team work among young people.
‘Masculine’ and ‘Feminine’ Prosocial Behaviours…
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
Slough Schools Science Mini-Conference
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…
Special issue of Laterality is out!
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.
British Journal of Developmental Psychology Special Issue, Gender and Relationships – podcast available online
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
British Academy Grant awarded
Managing impressions: Children’s understanding of performance and dispositional disclaimers as self-presentational tactics.
Negotiating everyday social interactions requires a variety of social skills, such as the ability to reflect on the thoughts, feelings, and expectations of others. This research investigates developmental trends in children’s understanding of how disclaimers (a self-presentational tactic) can be used to manage the impressions others may have of the self. Anticipation of poor behaviour on an imminent task may result in the use of a disclaimer – verbal statement used to protect oneself from negative social evaluation by dissociating the poor behaviour from their identity. Eleven-year-olds recognise the mitigating function of a disclaimer (e.g., to avoid punishment; Bennett, 1990), and are more positive about future behaviour performance when a disclaimer is used (Watling & Banerjee, under review). Yet, little is known about children’s understanding of the self-presentational function of disclaimers (i.e., to avoid today’s behaviour from influencing an audience’s beliefs about the individual). This research will explore how 8- to 14-year-olds understand disclaimers, including those that are related to their performance (ability) and to dispositions (personality).
Primary investigator: Dr. Dawn Watling
Peer rejection and social understanding: A vicious cycle
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.