Thursday, August 23, 2012

Gah. I need to get caught up. Have a couple of craft projects I still have to get off the camera and post.

But this post is about guinea piggery. I took the Lil' Dude to SFU to participate in a study to see how temperament affects social and emotion development in 4- and 5-year-olds. He played a bunch of games, and they monitored his reaction. He almost didn't go through with it, getting intimidated by the first exercise, where the researcher showed him four images and asked him to point to the one he thought was associated with a word she uttered. We had to stop, and I had to feed him a snack and negotiate with him. Eventually the researcher started another game, and he seemed to open up after that.

It seems that right now, he interprets what people tell him pretty much at face value. They tried a Simon Says–type game, and he didn't really get it—he just did everything he was told. On the questionnaires I had to fill out, one of the question asked me how likely he was to feign enthusiasm about getting a disappointing gift. At the end of the session, the researcher pretended to wrap a gift and gave it to him. He opened it and discovered a stick.

"What is it?" the researcher asked.

"A stick!" he smiled.

Thing is, I think he was genuinely happy about the prospect of a gift stick. I don't know what that does to skew their data. Anyway, after the hour-long session, he got to pick out a "real" gift (a set of markers that had stamps on the other end) and he got this certificate he seems pretty stoked about. I got $20.