The purpose of the proposed research is to develop a set of tasks and procedures that will serve a larger research program addressing the early development of cooperative peer interaction in relation to developing social understanding. Cooperative play with peers is a primary context in which children acquire social, communicative, and interactive skills and in which they come to understand and use the intentions, desires, and mental states of others to predict and regulate their own and others' behavior. Although great strides are being made in describing social understanding in infants and toddlers, there is virtually no work addressing how this developing understanding is put to work in social interaction with other children. The long-term objective of the applicant's research program is to understand the origins and early development of cooperative peer interaction and its relation to developments in social understanding of both self and others.
The aim of the particular research described in this proposal is to establish the tasks and procedures that will permit the programmatic study of these early developments. The proposed research has two specific aims: 1) to develop and test a new set of peer cooperation procedures for one and two year olds that are motivating, cognitively and motorically simple and readily achieved, as well as progressive in the nature of the social understanding required to achieve them; 2) to extend and modify procedures derived from tasks used by others to assess parallel developments in young children's self- and other-awareness, and to test hypotheses about their coherence and construct validity as well as their associations with age. The proposed research will build on methods used in the applicant's own past research, as well as those appearing more recently in others' research. A series of five successive cross-sectional studies is proposed to test and evaluate the tasks. Each study will include 18 and 24 month olds. ? ?

Agency
National Institute of Health (NIH)
Institute
Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health & Human Development (NICHD)
Type
Small Research Grants (R03)
Project #
5R03HD043971-02
Application #
6748481
Study Section
Special Emphasis Panel (ZHD1-DSR-H (08))
Program Officer
Maholmes, Valerie
Project Start
2003-09-01
Project End
2006-08-31
Budget Start
2004-09-01
Budget End
2006-08-31
Support Year
2
Fiscal Year
2004
Total Cost
$69,179
Indirect Cost
Name
University of Pittsburgh
Department
Psychology
Type
Schools of Arts and Sciences
DUNS #
004514360
City
Pittsburgh
State
PA
Country
United States
Zip Code
15213
Waugh, Whitney; Brownell, Celia; Pollock, Brianna (2015) Early socialization of prosocial behavior: Patterns in parents' encouragement of toddlers' helping in an everyday household task. Infant Behav Dev 39:1-10
Brownell, Celia A; Svetlova, Margarita; Anderson, Ranita et al. (2013) Socialization of Early Prosocial Behavior: Parents' Talk about Emotions is Associated with Sharing and Helping in Toddlers. Infancy 18:91-119
Brownell, Celia A; Nichols, Sara R; Svetlova, Margarita et al. (2010) The head bone's connected to the neck bone: when do toddlers represent their own body topography? Child Dev 81:797-810
Svetlova, Margarita; Nichols, Sara R; Brownell, Celia A (2010) Toddlers' prosocial behavior: from instrumental to empathic to altruistic helping. Child Dev 81:1814-27
Nichols, Sara R; Svetlova, Margarita; Brownell, Celia A (2010) Toddlers' understanding of peers' emotions. J Genet Psychol 171:35-53
Brownell, Celia A; Svetlova, Margarita; Nichols, Sara (2009) To share or not to share: When do toddlers respond to another's needs? Infancy 14:117-130
Nichols, Sara R; Svetlova, Margarita; Brownell, Celia A (2009) The role of social understanding and empathic disposition in young children's responsiveness to distress in parents and peers. Cogn Brain Behav 13:449-478
Brownell, Celia A; Zerwas, Stephanie; Ramani, Geetha B (2007) ""So big"": the development of body self-awareness in toddlers. Child Dev 78:1426-40
Brownell, Celia A; Ramani, Geetha B; Zerwas, Stephanie (2006) Becoming a social partner with peers: cooperation and social understanding in one- and two-year-olds. Child Dev 77:803-21