How children consider objects provides a peek into their behavior
Young children gravitate toward objects with anthropomorphic features, an inclination that is not as strong in children with early signs of antisocial behavior, according to research from the lab of associate professor of psychology Rebecca Waller.
2 min. read
What’s more appealing: a yellow star, or a yellow star with a pattern on it, like dots or stripes? How about a yellow star with facial features, like friendly eyes and a mouth? And what if that star has a name?
For small children, those minor variations actually cue different responses, according to new research from the lab of Rebecca Waller, associate professor of psychology in the School of Arts & Sciences. Such reactions matter, the team finds, because they may also help researchers identify the risk of antisocial behavior earlier.
Published in Developmental Psychology, the work finds that children between the ages of 3 and 5 broadly gravitate toward objects with anthropomorphic features and names. That trend becomes less pronounced among children with callous-unemotional traits, a pattern of behavior that typically reflects a disregard for others and a lack of empathy, along with, at times, risk for conduct disorder.
“It’s really interesting to think about how this might disrupt [how these children] play, especially play with inanimate objects,” says Kristin Murtha, the paper’s lead author and a clinical research coordinator in Waller’s lab. “It may also change which toys they gravitate to.”
Waller, who has spent 15 years studying children who exhibit such traits, says that these findings are especially striking in the context of other work on this population. The results show that those children with callous-unemotional traits “are less motivated by having close social relationships with others.”
Waller’s research has long explored how environmental factors spur the development of antisocial behaviors in children. Along with Waller and other lab members, undergraduate Charlotte Brown developed a computer task to test which anthropomorphic features children might detect and respond to such that it changed their willingness to choose an object. The ultimate goal of the work was to determine how children—those both with and without callous-unemotional traits—might respond to such objects, giving researchers insight into how quickly those attributes develop and manifest.
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