The Influence of Person Familiarity on Children's Social Information Processing

The Influence of Person Familiarity on Children’s Social Information Processing by Andrew J. Cummings Dr. Jennifer Rennels, Examination Committee Chair Associate Professor of Psychology University of Nevada, Las Vegas This study examined the influence person familiarity has on children’s social information processing (SIP) choices and emotion recognition. Children in grades 2 through 5 watch a videotaped expression of a familiar or unfamiliar individual while listening to a hypothetical social interaction. Following the video clip, children responded to open-ended questions and prompted questions designed to assess their strategies and goals in the social interaction. Children also selected from two choices (either ‘on purpose’ or ‘by accident’) for their attribution of the individual’s intent. Last, children identified the emotion that they believed the individual in the video was experiencing the most. For children’s open-ended response strategies, females were more likely to provide a relational response (i.e., a response that helps to maintain or strengthen the social relationship) compared to males when viewing an unfamiliar person. For the prompted response strategies, males were more likely to provide a relational response for a familiar compared to unfamiliar person. Children were also more likely to attribute purposeful intent to the unfamiliar than familiar person. The 2 and 3 grade children were more likely to make relational responses for the open-ended questions compared to the 4 and