Can you identify which faces are real ? Your Baby can !

Another productive and busy year here at the Emory Infant and Child Lab, thanks to the joint effort of many individuals: the diligent care and supervision of our Lab Coordinator Theresa Nettles, all the good work from our visiting scholars, graduate, as well as volunteering undergraduate students. And again, thanks to the parents and children who came to visit the Lab and participated in our studies over the past year. As always, the goal of the Infant and Child Lab is to contribute to the scientific understanding of how the minds of children grow. We could not do it without you. Let me mention a few cardinal moments from the past year at the Lab. We welcomed a new graduate student, Sara Valencia who quickly embarked on a Master’s project on the development of self-consciousness and the sensitivity to approval looks from adults in 1-2 year-olds (see pg. 4). Shensheng Wang passed, with flying colors, his comprehensive exam on the topic of “Shadenfreude”, trying to explain in the perspective of the development of pleasure one might gain from the misfortune of others and is now preparing his Ph.D. dissertation project around the large topic of social comparison by young children and adults (see pg. 3). The Lab also hosted Laurent Cordonier, a visiting Swiss research scientist and Ph.D. student from Lausanne who conducted a study on social conformity in 3 to 7 year-olds in collaboration and with the help of Theresa Nettles (See pg. 2). We are currently writing up the results suggesting that by 5 years children intuitively anticipate that someone would forget about what is true and pretend otherwise to align with a majority opinion to gain friendship and affiliation. We hope to show that by 5 years, and not prior, children become strategic in understanding the value of compromise and belief adjustment to fulfill basic affiliation needs. Since the beginning of the year, Amélie Deschenaux, yet another visiting Swiss scholar, joined the Lab to start a project on young children’s understanding of imitation, in particular the role of imitation in forging close social affiliation by 2-5 year-olds (See pg. 5). We will keep you posted on her progress but the project is promising and Amélie is almost ready to start collecting data with, once again, the diligent help of Theresa Nettles. Otherwise, my book on the “Origins of Possession: Owning and sharing in development” was published by Cambridge University Press in October 2014. Our major cross-cultural study on ownership reasoning across 7 cultures was published in the flagship journal Cognition and many more papers and chapters are in press or were submitted, including a research on sharing by Tibetan preschoolers attending a traditional Buddhist school in Dharamsala, India, where the Dalai Lama resides. The study was run by one of our Honors undergraduate students, Steven Starr, who is now finishing his thesis on the effect of short-term compassion training by elementary school children in an Atlanta school (See pg. 7). Finally, Emma Burgin, another undergraduate student, tested more than 40 children and is now about to defend an Honors Thesis on the topic of color preference and reputation by 3 to 7 year-old children (See pg. 6). A busy year indeed! Once again, to all the parents and children who came or are planning to come to the Lab: thank you for all your help. Do not hesitate to contact us for any further input or information. We hope you will enjoy the newsletter. As usual, please circulate and spread the word... Article by: Philippe Rochat Ph.D. Head of the Emory Infant and Child Lab Meet the Lab: