Amy-Week 1

On the first day, I arrived at Tomasello Lab at Duke a few minutes earlier than 9 and found that I was one of the three people who arrived the earliest. I first met and introduced myself to Amanda, a lab manager, and Celia, a Senior Theses Student at the neighboring Empathy Development Lab (since the PI of the neighboring lab is the wife of my PI and the two labs are both part of Duke Child Studies, their labs basically work together all the time). After familiarizing myself with the purpose of different rooms, I used the first day to finish CITI Program training before I started doing work.

Then on the second day, I started working with Celia on her project about how parenting styles relate to parenting behaviors, and how they affect children’s self-regulation. During the first week, 11 groups of parents and their children came to the lab and participated in Parent-Child Play Task. Specifically, the children were instructed to make four different shapes (triangle, house, pyramid, and box) and were the only people who could touch the toys. The parents were allowed to help them verbally, but not physically. In the first condition of the task, participants were told that the experimenter forgot instructions and children were not allowed to touch the toys while the experimenter left. In the second condition, the participants had the instructions and could approach to the task however they wanted. Then, in the last condition, the experimenter came in and reminded the children that they only have one minute left. Videotaping the entire process, therefore, helped us observe how parents employed different parenting methods when conditions varied. Further, the parents did not know the actual purpose of the study: they were told that we were trying to observe how their children approached the tasks. To start, I watched the videos recorded and created transcripts so that I could later analyze the behaviors of the parents and children, which took me almost four days to finish. I also helped record the data from the questionnaires that the adult participants filled out, in which they rated on their spouses’ attitude and behaviors in educating their children (for instance, one statement was “My partner is responsive to our child’s behaviors”, and the two parents of the child needed to rate from 1 to 5 to indicate whether it was an accurate description).