Undergraduate Research Day 2020
Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/20158
With students involved in so many research opportunities, Undergraduate Research Day provides the perfect opportunity for them to share their work with the campus community. Held each April, Undergraduate Research Day showcases current research, scholarship, and artistic endeavors.
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Item Children's Evaluations of Helpful and Unhelpful Individuals(2020) Forman, Sydney; Woodward, Amanda; Beier, Jonathan; Beier, JonathanHumans are cooperative and often help one another. Although we know that young children are helpful, there is much to understand about children’s evaluations of others who do and do not help. Prior work examined evaluations during middle childhood of helpers and non-helpers in India and the US in different settings (Miller, Bersoff, & Harwood, 1990). American children’s evaluations centered on their relationships with the needy person (e.g. friend or family member) and how severe the person’s need was. These differences in evaluations raise questions of how children’s views of helpful and unhelpful interactions arise, earlier development. The current studies examine 3- to 6-year-old children’s interpretations and evaluations of helpful and unhelpful people. Experiment 1 (N=95 of planned 96) investigated children’s evaluations of people who help versus neutral people and their views of helpful versus unhelpful interactions. Children watched two sets of videos. First, children watched a video of a helper giving tape to someone hanging a poster and a video of a neutral character with another girl. When asked to evaluate the helpful versus neutral characters, children rated the helper more positively (59 of 95, p = 0.01). Then, children watched videos of helpful and not helpful interactions. Overall, children viewed helpful action as more acceptable than unhelpful actions (X^2(1) = 85.01, p < 0.01). Experiment 2 (N=61 of planned 96) expanded this work by examining children’s evaluations of characters who do not help. Preliminary analyses will be presented in the poster.Item Preschoolers negatively evaluate social excluders but do not always dis-prefer them(2020) Horen, Lindsay; Knoll, Sarah; Woodward, Amanda; Beier, JonathanSocial exclusion is harmful and leads to negative consequences in the cognitive and social domains (Wesselman & Williams, 2013). Children use strategies to alleviate the negative effects of social exclusions. One of these strategies is to behave in ways that facilitate social connection. For instance, after observing social exclusion young children sit closer to others, remember more social events, and imitate others more accurately (Marinovic et al., 2017; Marinovic & Trauble, 2018; Watson-Jones et al., 2014), tend to remember more social events, and imitate others. The current study investigated cognitive processes that may underlie children’s choices of whom to interact with after exclusion. Specifically, we examined whether 3- to 6- year old children who observed third-party social exclusion detected social exclusion, evaluated excluders negatively, and if watching exclusion influenced their play partner choices. Overall, we found that across age groups, all children detected social exclusion after it occurred (67 of 69, p< 0.01) but did not detect exclusion when it did not occur (2 of 69, p< 0.01). Children also evaluated social excluders more negatively than social includers (b= -0.06, t(67)= 3.11, p= 0.003). With age, children evaluated social excluders more negatively, but children across ages evaluated includers positively. Only 5- and 6-year-olds preferred to play with includers more than excluders. 3- and 4-year-olds did not show a preference for either character. These findings indicated that both younger and older children can detect exclusion and evaluate excluders, but only older children prefer to play with includers over excluders. Future work should examine why younger children do not show similar preferences.