We study children like these

Our laboratory playroom is equipped for videotaping and one-way observation of experimental and naturalistic procedures with young children and their parents.  We have space in Mason Hall for undergraduate and graduate student offices, as well as for transcription, storage and management of data from our developmental studies.

Description of Ongoing Research Projects:
 

•  Our lab has just been funded by a major grant from The Spencer Foundation and the William T. Grant Foundation to study the nature of individual differences in preschoolers’ achievement motivation and the temperament and socialization correlates of these differences.  In previous research (Smiley & Dweck, 1994), we identified three subgroups of 4-and 5-year-olds by examining their responses in failure situations.  Children differed in their persistence, emotions, optimism about future success and self-evaluations of ability following a failure experience.

•  In our ongoing work, we are interested in exploring two additional aspects of children’s response to failure--effects on performance during failure and generalization across tasks.  Performance differences have been observed in older children but not yet in preschoolers.  It is crucial to demonstrate response generalization in order to claim that the differences we observed are robust.

•  In addition, we are beginning to explore the temperamental and socialization correlates of individual differences in achievement motivation.  Working from a discrete emotions perspective of temperament, we hypothesize that temperamental differences in proneness to fear, sadness, anger and interest will be related to children’s responses to failure.  We also expect that parental directiveness in nonachievement as well as in achievement situations in which there is either pressure to perform or outright failure will be related to children’s responses.  Further, we anticipate that temperament and socialization forces will interact to contribute to child motivational styles.

•  This research is being conducted in our laboratory at Pomona College and in nearby preschools.  Our research team includes students from Pomona College’s Psychology Deparment as well as from the Applied Developmental Psychology program at Claremont Graduate University.

•  In collaboration with colleagues from UCLA, we are completing a study of 12- to 30-month-olds’ conceptualizations of self and other in request situations.  For this study, we examined over 3,000 episodes of requests to mothers from 10 children at five successive ages--12, 16, 20, 24 and 30 months.

•  To draw inferences about toddlers’ concepts of self and other, we analyzed change over time in nonverbal and verbal request behaviors.  In particular, we focused on change in the rate of production of “enactive gestures”--whole or partial body or hand movements that function to enact (partially) the requested action.  We reasoned that these gestures indicate that children fail to distinguish the separate roles of the self as communicator or persuader and the other as agent of the requested action.  Using Hierarchical Linear Modeling (HLM), we found that enactive gesturing rates were quite variable at 12 months, that they declined linearly between 12 and 24 months and that they leveled off between 24 and 30 months for all children at around 10 percent of requests.  We also tracked the emergence of verbal requests about people--inquiries about the child’s own actions, goals and states as well as those of other people.  We found that requests concerning the self emerged at 24 months, whereas requests about others emerged at 30 months.

•  We also examined, using HLM, the relation between children’s increasing MLU and decline in enactive gesturing.  The analysis showed that increasing linguistic sophistication does not account for the form of individual trajectories in enactive gesturing.  Again using HLM, we examined the predictive value of three early “exposure” variables to changes in enactive gesturing.  In particular, mother MLU, mother talk about other people’s actions and goals in request episodes, and mother talk about children’s actions and goals in request episodes were used to predict change in individual children’s enactive gesturing.  Neither complexity of mother speech (MLU) nor mother talk about others’ actions and goals predicted change in enactive gestures but mother talk about children’s actions and goals was very strongly predictive of individual rates of change in the 12 to 24 month period.  Together these data suggest that children’s concepts of self and other undergo dramatic change between 12 and 30 months, that conceptualizations of self precede and perhaps inform concepts of others, and that mother linguistic input may assist children in creating knowledge of roles of the self and other in interaction.