Poster #83 - The association between dwell time in the eyes area and prosocial behavior

• In Event: Poster Session 02

Abstract

In order to effectively help another in distress, we must recognize the other’s needs, emotional state, and regulate our own emotional state (Decety & Meyer, 2008). In order to collect information regarding others' emotional states, people tend to look mainly at the eyes and mouth (Blais et al., 2012), with substantial individual differences in the pattern of scanning the faces (Guy et al., 2019). Perceiving others’ emotional states can increase own arousal, and over-arousal often prohibits prosocial helping (Davidov et al., 2013). The aforementioned is based on studies mainly conducted with children and adults, but little is known about earlier stages in development, such as toddlerhood. In the proposed study, 30-month-old toddlers will watch a video of a peer crying for 40 seconds while an eye-tracker is recording the gaze of the participant. Dwell time in the eyes and mouth areas of interest will be calculated. We aim to replicate findings from other stages of development in young toddlers and examine whether toddlers look predominantly at the eyes or the mouth to infer others' emotions. In addition, we predict that the ability to self-regulate interacts with the tendency to look at others’ eyes in predicting prosocial behavior.
Hypotheses:
1-The proportion of average dwell time in the eyes area of interest (out of dwell time in the eyes and mouth areas of interest) will be greater than 50%.
2-The average dwell time to eyes will be positively related to maternal reports of prosocial behavior.
3-The average dwell time to the eyes will interact with self-regulation in predicting maternal reports of prosocial behavior. We predict that a correlation between dwell time in the eyes area and prosocial behavior will be significant for those high in self-regulation but not for those who are low.

Prospective participants are 140 mother-child dyads who participated in previous waves of a longitudinal study of socio-emotional development. The current data collection takes place during home visits. Considering technical difficulties in conducting eye-tracking tasks, we aim for a minimum sample of 40 toddlers. A sample size of 40 toddlers will allow examining hypotheses 1 and 2. A sample size of at least 60 toddlers is required to examine hypothesis 3 with an effect size of β=0.22 (based on Gpower calculations)
Measures:
Eye tracking – Children's gaze is recorded using an EyeLink Portable Duo system (SR Research, Ontario, Canada) with a sampling rate of 1000 Hz.
Prosocial behavior is measured using the corresponding subscale in the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire (SDQ; Muris, Meesters, & van den Berg, 2003). The prosocial behavior subscale contains 5 items reported on a scale of 0 to 2: 0- not true, 1- somewhat true, and 2- certainly true.
Effortful control is measured using the corresponding subscale of the Early Childhood Behavior Questionnaire (ECBQ; Putnam et al, 2006). This subscale contains 12 items referring to the frequency of child behavior in commonly occurring situations. The report is on 7-points Likert scale: 1- never, 7- often.

Authors

• Liat Israeli-Ran, Ben Gurion University of the Negev, Israel
  Presenting Author

• Tamar Kadosh Laor, Ben Gurion University of the Negev

• Florina Uzefovsky, Ben Gurion University in the Negev