The Social Development Lab is part of the Developmental Studies Centre at the Department of Psychology, Royal Holloway, University of London. |
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The laboratory is directed by Patrick Leman and Dawn Watling, and research focuses on children's development in the context of their social relationships with others. Research topics include the study of children's ethnic and gender identity, collaboration and learning, moral reasoning and behaviour, understanding of self-presentation, emotion recognition, and children's friendship groups. |
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Groups don’t want boys: Age differences in judgements about excluding and including boys and girls – Study 2
Really interesting results from a study investigating the effect of gender on judgments about how good or bad it is to exclude others from a group.
A review of the results can be found here:
Ben Hine
Social Development lab at BPS Conference in Newcastle
Members of the lab presented papers at the British Psychological Society’s Developmental Section Conference in Newcastle, earlier this month.
Investigating Gender Stereotypes of Prosocial Behaviour – Study 1
Great results from the first study investigating Gender Stereotypes
A review of these results can be found here:
Ben Hine
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
How do gender differences in prosocial thinking develop?
The current study is investigating how children’s judgements of prosociality change over age and how gender effects these judgements. Children and young adults from years 2, 4, 6, 8 and 10 are being asked to make judgements about vignettes they are presented with, with either male or female protagonists acting either pro-socially or failing to act pro-socially. They are also asked to make judgements on which sex is more likely to be pro-social; boys, girls or either. As well as judgements of these ‘individual’ protagonists, the participants are also asked to make judgements about how groups of each gender act, specifically when excluding or including a person of the same or opposite sex. It is hypothesised that the judgements of girls behaviour will remain relatively consistent, with high approval of pro-social behaviour and low approval of non pro-social behaviour across all ages. Conversely judgements of boys behaviour are expected to change in the two oldest age groups, coinciding with early adolescence, with boys pro-social behaviour being less positively judged and boys non pro-social behaviour being less negatively judged.
With regards to gender likelihood, it is hypothesised that judgements will fall predominantly in the either category across the primary school age groups, with a gender effect becoming significant in the early adolescent phase; with secondary school children judging girls as more likely to be pro-social and boys as more likely to be non pro-social. Furthermore, with reference to the group judgement conditions, it is hypothesised that at primary school ages children will judge inclusion as good and exclusion as bad regardless of gender. Then at the secondary school level, gendered preferences will emerge, with judgements favouring inclusion of same gender and exclusion of the opposite gender and judgements condemning inclusion of the opposite gender and exclusion of the same gender.
The study aims to show how gender roles and gender stereotypes have a significant influence on the likelihood of pro-social behaviour being performed, and how peer judgements are hugely influential in the undertaking of kind acts.
Researcher: Ben Hine
Supervisor: Patrick Leman
A review of this study’s results can be found here:
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.
New research project in local schools: Why present yourself negatively?
Past research in our group has shown that 11-year-olds understand why someone would offer a disclaimer (verbal statement offered to explain why they may perform poorly in the future) before anticipated poor performance. This research will extend previous work by exploring how 8- to 14-year-olds understanding differs depending on if the person offering the disclaimer performs consistently with their expectations (i.e., poorly), or inconsistenly with their expectations (i.e., quite well). We will also be asking children about their friendships and how they think and feel in various social situations.
Our research team includes: Emma Harding, Alice Hill, Rebecca Griffin, Sylvia Michaeel, and Antonia Samanns
Supervisor: Dr Dawn Watling
Can dance change young people’s ethnic group attitudes?
As part of her masters research project, Michelle Cruickshank will be exploring how far imagined contact with different ethnic groups can lead to changes in ethnic group attitudes and streotyping. We will also explore whether learning about other cultures by taking part in normal classroom activities (lessons) is enhanced by culture-specific physical activities such as learning a dance style from a different cultural group. Data collection is expected to begin in March 2011.
Researcher: Michelle Cruickshank
Supervisor: Patrick Leman
How does the way we describe ourselves depend on the information we know about our audience?
We know that children understand that others make statements to manipulate what others think about them (make them think they are nice, smart, etc.). This study extends previous work with 5- to 11-year-olds, asking children to describe themselves for the experimenter. The children then will learn a new game, and will be told that they should describe themselves in a way to encourage someone from another school to choose them as a partner for the game. We wish to see if children will modify their self-descriptions depending on if they know their audience wants a partner who is nice or who will help them win, and at what age they will begin to change the way they describe themselves.
Research will be conducted by Philippa Day and is supervised by Dr. Dawn Watling