Peddie EXP Summer 2018

At the beginning of the fourth week, I started working on my third project with Charlotte, a PhD student at the Tomasello Lab. For the first part of the study, the child watched a pre-recorded Skype video in which three different adult experimenters name three toys (a dog, a book, and a dump truck) in their own ways. The first two people name them “a fish”, “a spoon”, and “a shoe” respectively, which is obviously wrong. Then when the third person came and was about to name the toys, there was a buzzing sound in the video and the experimenter would ask what the child participants expected the third person to say. After the children answered, the experimenter would take out three toys with different shapes and colors and l et the child play with them for a while. After that, the child would watch another pre-recorded Skype video in which the first person in the previous video assigned three names to the three toys respectively. As she left, a new person who did not appear in th...

During the past week, many people in my lab were preparing for their presentations and posters on their projects. At the end of the week, all students that participated in VIP, a summer research program for psychology majors at Duke, presented their projects to their PIs, peers, and parents. It was intriguing to hear about a variety of topics even though they are all psychology-related. Among the different projects, one that left a deep impression on me was a project about how the race of students’ roommates would affect their willingness to think about questions related to diversity. While I finished working on my first project, I started working on my other projects. For the one that I work with Vivian, a Senior Theses Student at Tomasello Lab, we’ll be learning about whether young children perceive the rules made by themselves and those they make with others differently. Since this project just started, we had to see if the designed experiment would actually work. The ...

In the second week, I started to analyze the data collected from the questionnaires distributed to adult participants by putting the scores they rated for different statements to according dimensions, such as Connection Dimension and Physical Coercion Dimension, and calculating Authoritative, Authoritarian and Permissive Parenting Score accordingly. Since parenting styles mainly include authoritative (high discipline and high nurturance), authoritarian (high discipline and low nurturance), permissive (low discipline and high nurturance), and neglectful (low discipline and low nurturance) styles, we were able to categorize the parenting styles of different groups of parent(s) through the calculations by looking at which score was the highest. Then for the rest of the week, I worked on “coding” the behaviors of the participants. Specifically, I first looked at the transcripts that I created and counted the number of times when parents’ teaching and intrusion and children’s compliance an...

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, ...