Children draw more affiliative pictures following priming with third-party ostracism
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Date
06/2015Keywords
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Abstract
Humans have a strong need to belong. Thus, when signs of ostracism are detected, adults often feel motivated to affiliate with others in order to re-establish their social connections. This study investigated the importance of affiliation to young children following priming with ostracism. Four- and 5-year-old children were primed with either ostracism or control videos and their understanding of, and responses to, the videos were measured. Results showed that children were able to report that there was exclusion in the ostracism videos, and that they recognized that the ostracized individual felt sad. Most interestingly, when subsequently asked to draw a picture of themselves and their friend, children primed with ostracism depicted relationships that were significantly more affiliative. Children drew themselves and their friend standing significantly closer together and adults rated their drawings as more affiliative overall. These findings introduce drawing as a useful new method for measuring social motivations and processes following an experimental manipulation, and demonstrate that affiliation is particularly important to children following even a vicarious experience of social exclusion.
Citation
Song , R , Over , H & Carpenter , M 2015 , ' Children draw more affiliative pictures following priming with third-party ostracism ' , Developmental Psychology , vol. 51 , no. 6 , pp. 831-840 . https://doi.org/10.1037/a0039176
Publication
Developmental Psychology
Status
Peer reviewed
ISSN
0012-1649Type
Journal article
Rights
© 2015 American Psychological Association. This article may not exactly replicate the final version published in the APA journal. It is not the copy of record. This work is made available online in accordance with the publisher’s policies. This is the author created, accepted version manuscript following peer review and may differ slightly from the final published version. The final published version of this work is available at http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/a0039176
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