social – The Apple doesn't Fall Far

Fear can be learned by observing others in scary situations. If you think about it, it’s probably a useful ability. If a child is walking through a garden with their parent, and the parent sees a poisonous snake on the path ahead and jumps back or hesitates, or maybe even screams, you would hope that the child would take notice of that and become fearful or at the very least more weary of their surroundings.

In 2017, Dunne and Askew used pictures of faces (expressions) and animals to create observational associations of dangerous versus safe environments.

Children (aged 6-10) were shown faces (either happy or scared) along with a picture of a novel animal. This allowed them to form an association between which animals should be feared and which should not be feared.

Overall, the experiment determined that after having viewed the paired images. Children reported being more afraid and wanting to avoid animals that were previously paired with the scared images. In addition, when then paired with happy faces, the previously scary animals did not elicit the same fear response as before.

Dunne, G., & Askew, C. (2018). Vicarious learning and reduction of fear in children via adult and child models. Emotion, 18(4), 528-535. doi:http://dx.doi.org.cat1.lib.trentu.ca:8080/10.1037/emo0000341

Children are quite fearful. The above study can be used to understand how to counteract children’s fears using yourself as a model for fearless behaviour. A good example of this is going on a plane. If a parent is afraid of flying their child is likely going to be fearful of the experience as well because their mom or dad has demonstrated to them that flying is something to be fearful of. Whereas, a parent who frames the experience of flying as an adventure, or something fun, is more likely to have a child display behaviours consistent with excitement, or contentment.

Observational Causal Learning is when children (generally aged 2-4) learn new things about their environment based on observing cause-effect relationships.

Waismeyer, A., & Meltzoff, A. N. (2017). Learning to make things happen: Infants’ observational learning of social and physical causal events. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 162, 58-71. doi:http://dx.doi.org.cat1.lib.trentu.ca:8080/10.1016/j.jecp.2017.04.018

In order to demonstrate the ability of infants to display observational learning, Waismeyer and Meltzoff (2017) conducted three experiments that examined infants learning of a physical event, and a social-causal event. In addition they also looked at the ability for infants to learn via observation when the event did not occur every time but instead occurred only a majority of the time (probabilistic cause-effect relationship).

Physical Cause-Effect Relationship

Children observed a model manipulate a marble dispenser. There were two test objects. When the model shook object 1 a marble was dispensed. When the model shook object 2 no marble was dispensed.

On average, children specifically chose to shake object 1, demonstrating that they had learned the cause-effect relationship.

Social Cause-Effect Relationship

Similar to the first experiment however, the marble dispenser was replaced by an adult “dispenser”. When the model shook object 1 the adult presented the model with a marble. When the model shook object 2 the adult did not present the model with a marble.

Children observed this activity played by the model and adult and when it was their turn to “play” were generally successful in choosing the correct object to shake. This means that infants are able to observe interactions between people and make decisions about how to behave and act in social situations.

Probabilistic Causal Relationships

The probabilistic experiment follows the same pattern of the first two experiments. However, when object 1 was shook a marble was only presented a majority of the time.

Children’s observations of probabilistic causality in the physical and social context demonstrated an understanding of the relationship between cause-effect regardless of the frequency to which the shaking of object 1 was reinforced by the presentation of a marble.

Waismeyer, A., & Meltzoff, A. N. (2017). Learning to make things happen: Infants’ observational learning of social and physical causal events. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 162, 58-71. doi:http://dx.doi.org.cat1.lib.trentu.ca:8080/10.1016/j.jecp.2017.04.018

This experiment highlights the importance of social modelling in your household. Children learn behaviours from the manner in which parents and siblings conduct themselves. In this way, children are becoming more independent and use increasingly complex forms of learning in order to decode social cues and learn right from wrong.