Memory for “mean” over “nice”: The influence of threat on children’s face memory

Kinzler, Katherine D.; Shutts, Kristin

doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2007.09.005

Cited by 69 publications

(79 citation statements)

References 25 publications

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“…In support of this theory, Kinzler and Shutts (2008) found that 4 year olds showed enhanced recognition for individuals who had committed a harmful action relative to helpful individuals. Further, 4 year olds did not show increased recognition for recipients of harmful acts over recipients of helpful acts, suggesting that such differences in the first experiment were not driven by generally better memory for negative events but by the motivation to detect and remember potentially threatening individuals.…”

Section: Extracting Valence Information From Social Behavioursmentioning

confidence: 59%

“…Indeed, faces seem to hold a special status in infant memory-6-month-olds' memory for photographs of faces are more durable than for abstract black and white patterns, for example (2 weeks versus 48 hours respectively, Fagan, 1973). Furthermore, research we will discuss in more detail later shows that other factors, such as the actions of the individual concerned, can affect face recognition at least in 4-year-olds (Kinzler & Shutts, 2008).…”

Section: Tracking Individuals-infants Ability To Recognise Facesmentioning

confidence: 94%

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Knowing who likes who: The early developmental basis of coalition understanding

Platten

Hernik

Fonagy

et al. 2010

Euro J Social Psych

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Group biases based on broad category membership appear early in human development. However, like many other primates humans inhabit social worlds also characterised by small groups of social coalitions which are not demarcated by visible signs or social markers. A critical cognitive challenge for a young child is thus how to extract information concerning coalition structure when coalitions are dynamic and may lack stable and outwardly visible cues to membership. Therefore, the ability to decode behavioural cues of affiliations present in everyday social interactions between individuals would have conferred powerful selective advantages during our evolution. This would suggest that such an ability may emerge early in life, however, little research has investigated the developmental origins of such processing. The present paper will review recent empirical research which indicates that in the first 2 years of life infants achieve a host of social-cognitive abilities that make them well adapted to processing coalition-affiliations of others. We suggest that such an approach can be applied to better understand the origins of intergroup attitudes and biases.

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Section: Extracting Valence Information From Social Behavioursmentioning

confidence: 59%

Section: Tracking Individuals-infants Ability To Recognise Facesmentioning

confidence: 94%

Knowing who likes who: The early developmental basis of coalition understanding

Platten

Hernik

Fonagy

et al. 2010

Euro J Social Psych

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…When each object is presented in comparison to a neutral object, infants engage with the neutral object over the negative object, yet they treat positive and neutral objects the same (Hornik, Risenhoover, & Gunnar, 1987;Mumme & Fernald, 2003). By preschool age, children's patterns of visual search reflect an advantage for monitoring faces displaying negative over neutral or positive expressions (LoBue, 2009), and children similarly exhibit better memory for individuals who are described as mean, rather than nice (Baltazar et al, 2012;Kinzler & Shutts, 2008). Enhanced attention to and memory for negative events may serve a protective function in guarding children against harmful future situations.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In regard to the negativity bias, past research provides evidence of children's and adults' heightened attention to, and memory for, negative social information (Baltazar et al, 2012;Baumeister et al, 2001;Kinzler & Shutts, 2008;LoBue, 2009;Rozin & Royzman, 2001). Beginning as early as infancy, children preferentially attend to negative over positive social information (see Vaish et al, 2008, for a review).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Children's sociolinguistic evaluations of nice foreigners and mean Americans.

Kinzler

DeJesus²

2013

Developmental Psychology

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Abstract:Three experiments investigated 5-to 6-year-old monolingual English-speaking American children's sociolinguistic evaluations of others based on their accent (native, foreign) and social actions (nice, mean, neutral). In Experiment 1, children expressed social preferences for nativeaccented English speakers over foreign-accented speakers, and they judged the native-accented speakers to be 'American.' In Experiments 2 and 3, the accented speakers were depicted as being nicer than the relatively meaner native speakers. Children's social preferences and judgments of others' personalities varied as a function of behavior; in particular, children disliked individuals who committed negative social actions. In contrast, children's judgments of nationality hinged exclusively on accent; across all conditions, children evaluated native-accented English speakers to be 'American,' regardless of whether they were nice or mean. These findings contribute to an understanding of the nature of children's reasoning about language as a social category and have implications for future research investigating children's thinking about language as a marker of national group identity.Keywords: language | nationality | social cognition | sociolinguistic evaluations | Englishspeaking American children | native-accented speakers Article:Children's social evaluations of others take on myriad forms. Some of these include evaluations that are based on an individual's history of behaviors. For example, children judge others based on their social actions and can use previous behavior to predict an individual's future acts (e.g., Cain, Heyman, & Walker, 1997). Others include evaluations of individuals based on their social group membership. For instance, children express social preferences for novel individuals (who have yet to display any actions) based on their race, gender, and accent (e.g., Aboud, 1988;Kinzler, Shutts, DeJesus, & Spelke, 2009;Ruble, Martin, & Berenbaum, 2006). Although potentially misleading, inferences based on social group membership have consequences for interpersonal evaluations and interactions throughout the lifespan (e.g., Gluszek & Dovidio, 2010). Building on research indicating that children express robust social preferences for novel individuals who share their native accent (Kinzler, Dupoux, & Spelke, 2007;Kinzler et al., 2009), the current research compares the judgments children make of others based on their accent and their past history of nice or mean behaviors. We investigate (a) whether children's preferences for native individuals are impacted by knowledge of a particular individual's social actions and (b) how the types of inferences that children make about others based on their accent versus their behaviors compare.Language and accent provide an important guide for children's early social preferences, but the reasons for this phenomenon remain unclear. Past research provides evidence that infants prefer to look at individuals who previously spoke in the native language of the infants' home environ...

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“…Rather than being influenced by self-concept, these memories are affected by different pressures, namely the adaptive utility of remembering that someone has done something negative so that they can be avoided in the future (e.g., Kinzler & Shutts, 2008). This is particularly interesting because it means that memory for the same actions may be very different depending on whether they are carried out by oneself or someone else.…”

Section: Negativity In Memory Of Othersmentioning

confidence: 99%

I remember Being Nice: Self-Enhancement Memory Bias in Adults and Children

Rowell

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Adults tend to remember themselves in a positive way. For example, they are more likely to remember their past good deeds rather than their bad deeds, which may help them to maintain good mental health and high self-esteem. In contrast, adults tend to have a negativity bias in memory for other people's actions, remembering more of their bad deeds than their good ones. This is also adaptive in that it may help them avoid harmful individuals in the future. In the studies presented here, I ask whether children are also biased to remember their own good deeds better than their bad deeds. I additionally address whether this bias is linked to children's developing self-concepts and to socialization practices during parent-child conversations about the past.Study 1 showed that a well-known memory paradigm can be used to address questions about how well children and adults remember positively and negatively valenced material encoded in relation to themselves and others. Study 1a found that adults remembered nice verbs encoded with reference to themselves better than mean verbs encoded with reference to themselves or mean verbs encoded with reference to someone else. These memory differences were present even when statistical models were used that separated actual remembering from guessing strategies. Study 2 then found this same bias in 8-to 10-year-old children, providing some of the first experimental evidence for self-enhancement in children's memory. Study 3 replicated the findings of Study 1a and sought to address potential mechanisms of selfenhancement bias. Imagine that you get angry and yell at a friend, insulting her and bringing her to tears. Now imagine instead that this friend does the very same thing to you. Will your memory be similarly accurate for both events? Will you be just as likely to recall either event later on? There are many influences on memory that could help predict how well you would remember either event, such as emotional content or distinctiveness. Importantly, there are also factors that only apply to one scenario or the other-functional aspects of memory that lead to a divergence in how well these two events would be remembered. Table of ContentsIn the first scenario, you are the perpetrator of a transgression and because of this, your self-concept will have an important influence on how you remember what happens. Adults generally have a positive view of themselves which leads them to remember themselves in a positive way (Greenwald, 1980). Thus, you are more likely to remember nice things you have done than neutral or mean things. Remembering more of our positive past actions is beneficial in that it may contribute to good mental health (see Taylor & Brown, 1988) and help people in Western cultures live up to the standards of their culture by maintaining high self-esteem , which then continues to perpetuate memory bias.In the second scenario, your friend is the perpetrator of the transgression and you are merely the recipient of their actions. Thus, your self-concept is less o...

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Memory for “mean” over “nice”: The influence of threat on children’s face memory

Cited by 69 publications

References 25 publications

Knowing who likes who: The early developmental basis of coalition understanding

Knowing who likes who: The early developmental basis of coalition understanding

Children's sociolinguistic evaluations of nice foreigners and mean Americans.

I remember Being Nice: Self-Enhancement Memory Bias in Adults and Children

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