Poster #100 - Dogs as a context for emotional learning: Do children learn more from real than toy dogs?

• In Event: Poster Session 18

Abstract

Empathy is a multidimensional construct driven by cognitive and affective processes (Belacchi & Farina, 2012). In thinking about how we can promote empathy development in young children, researchers have examined the role of language in shaping children’s empathy and prosocial development. For example, research suggests that promoting children’s mental state talk is related to better emotion understanding and prosocial behaviors (Grazzani et al., 2016). In particular, parent-child conversations about emotions and mental states has been shown to positively impact prosocial behavior among preschoolers and older children (Drummond et al., 2014), and these conversations may provide the scaffolding framework that children use to acquire a better understanding of the emotions and mental states of others, a key component of empathy development. One context where this kind of language may be fostered naturally is when talking about pets such as dogs, who may serve as a social catalyst for learning about empathy toward others (Melson, 2020). Thus, the goal of the current study is to examine the ways that we can naturally foster emotional and mental state language in children’s day-to-day lives, and to examine the extent to which specific contexts—the use of real and toy dogs—can foster emotional and mental state language to promote children’s positive emotional outcomes. In this study, parents and children (ages 3-5, target n= 180) who currently live with a pet dog or have never lived with a pet dog or cat are randomly assigned to read through a picture book about a real or toy dog. Conversations are coded for emotion and mental state (EMST) language provided by each speaker. Children then complete a prosocial vignette task in which children hear 2 helping and 2 sharing vignettes and are asked what they would do in each scenario. Children also complete an emotion perspective taking measure, in which they are asked to correctly label the emotion of the main character across 16 vignettes. Parents complete measures of their own and their child’s empathy, child’s social behavior and social understanding, and demographic information. We expect that parents will provide more EMST language when reading the book about the real dog than the toy dog, and that pet-owning parents will provide more EMST language than non-pet owners. We also expect that children in the real dog condition will report better emotional perspective taking and prosocial behaviors than the toy dog condition, and children living with a pet dog will report better emotional perspective taking and prosocial behaviors than children without a pet dog.  Finally, we expect that parents' EMST language will be positively related to children's emotional perspective taking and prosocial behaviors, and children's EMST language will be positively related to their emotional perspective taking and prosocial behaviors. Data collection and coding is ongoing and will be complete by the conference.

Authors

• Lori Beth Reider, Rutgers University - Newark
  Presenting Author

• Vanessa LoBue, Rutgers University