What Do You Know About Emotions in Others?

For 5-year-old to 7-year-old children. Only one child per family will be able to participate.

This study will take place on a video call, live with a researcher! Clicking on the “Schedule a time to participate” button will send you to an online calendar where you can select a date and time that works for you.

Your child will participate in a series of storytelling activities where they hear short descriptions of different characters' experiences in everyday situations and will be asked to share their thoughts on how some of those characters might be feeling. We will vary the amount of causal language in the descriptions that the children hear to see if that changes children's responses!

Parents will be asked to complete a brief empathy-related questionnaire (27 items) where they will be asked to state how much they identify with certain statements (e.g., "Watching a happy movie makes me happy") and provide basic demographic and language background information.

In this study, we are exploring how different ways of explaining emotions help children develop empathy and reasoning skills. Research has shown that causal reasoning helps children to consider the influence of actions and events on emotions and prosocial behaviors, but little is known about how children build these causal reasoning skills. One mechanism we believe to be important in the development of causal reasoning and empathy is the use of causal language in child-directed speech. We are specifically interested in how "causal talk" (explaining why someone feels a certain way) influences a child's ability to recognize and share the feelings of others.

Your participation will help us learn more about the developmental building blocks of emotional intelligence. By observing how children respond to different types of stories, we can better understand how caregivers and educators can support healthy social-emotional growth in early childhood.

30 - 45 minutes

After you participate, we will email you a $5 gift code for Amazon.com within five days to thank you for your time (only one per child). To be eligible for compensation, we ask that you:
(1) ensure that your child is in the specified age range,
(2) make sure that your child is visible during the study session,
(3) your child is able to understand the simple English instructions used in the task. Compensation is provided for participation and is not based on your child’s performance.