Cross-temporal Comparison of Two Cohorts of Sixth Grade Students’ Ability to Read Nonverbal Emotional Cues

• In Event: 3-049 - Be-Tween Devices: Connecting Pre- and Early- Adolescents’ Mobile Device Use and Wellbeing

Integrative Statement

Key social learning occurs during early childhood with lasting effects throughout the lifespan (Barth & Bastiani 1997; Trentacosta & Fine 2010). Family ownership of mobile technology has grown rapidly, particularly in households with young children. For example, in 2011, only 52% of US households with children under eight years of age owned a mobile device but by 2017, 98% did (Rideout 2017). With the ubiquity of mobile devices, many have questioned their effect on the social and emotional learning of children (Twenge 2017; Yan 2018).

In order to explore one aspect of this question, we conducted a cross-temporal comparison to compare two cohorts of sixth graders, one measured in 2012 (Uhls et al. 2014) and another in 2017. Each of these groups took tests designed to measure their ability to accurately identify nonverbal emotional cues. As such, we sought to explore whether the change in the early learning environment affected the social learning of the 2017 cohort.

Our hypothesis. Due to the increase in usage and earlier exposure, children with access to mobile technology in their early informal learning (i.e. under five years of age) environment would score worse on measures of nonverbal emotional understanding than children who did not have this access.

The study was designed to compare the scores of an entire grade of sixth grade students in 2017 from the same Southern California public elementary school as the 2012 sixth grade students (Uhls et al. 2014). The group of participants in 2012 consisted of 54 children from the Spring classes of sixth grade, and the group from 2017 consisted of 56 students from the Spring classes of sixth grade. The 2017 students included twenty-five boys, thirty girls and one child who identified as other, with a mean age of 11.67 (SD=.508) and a range of 11 to 13 years of age.

As in 2012, in order to measure nonverbal emotion understanding, we used tests that asked participants to infer emotional states from photographs of facial expressions (i.e. the Diagnostic Analysis of Nonverbal Accuracy II (DANVA 2)) and videotaped scenes with verbal cues removed (i.e. The Child and Adolescent Social Perception Measure (CASP)).

We found that sixth grade students in 2017 performed better than sixth grade students in 2012 on the DANVA2 but not on the CASP. This finding did not confirm our hypothesis and, in fact, contradicted it.

In 2012, sixth grade students had an average of 10.9 errors on the DANVA2, while in 2017, their errors were significantly reduced to an average of 7.3 (p<.00). For the CASP, in 2012, participants averaged 12.89 and in 2017, participants averaged 13.23. While their scores improved, the difference was not significant.

One possible reason participants improved on the DANVA2 is because mediated communication has become more visual and less text based, while sharing photos is common, particular with adolescents (Anderson and Jiang 2018). Accordingly participants may be more accurate at interpreting emotional cues on photos.

Authors

• Yalda Uhls, UCLA
  Presenting Author

• Julia Broome, UCLA
  Non-Presenting Author

• Shani Levi, Children's Digital Media Center@LA
  Non-Presenting Author

• Jade Beaver, Children's Digital Media Center@LA
  Non-Presenting Author

• Patricia Greenfield, Children's Digital Media Center@LA
  Non-Presenting Author