Infant Control Experiment

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The research study this article was based on, Infant control thyself: Infants’ integration of multiple social cues to regulate their imitative behavior, was a cross-sectional experiment of 15 month olds. One hundred fifty 15 month olds were randomly assigned to 5 groups: anger-attentive, anger-distracted, anger-back, anger-absent, and control. In anger-attentive, the emoter looked at the child while the toy was in front of them. In anger-distracted, the emoter read a magazine while facing the child. In anger-back, the emoter was turned opposite from the child so they couldn’t see the child. In anger-absent, the emoter left the room. For each group there was an emoter (unfamiliar female adult) and experimenter (familiar female adult) who interacted …show more content…

The experimenter played with the target act (toy) twice. Then the emoter entered, and the experimenter played with the target act again. The emoter responded, the experimenter gave the child the target act to play with for 20 seconds, and looked away from child. Latency to touch (the time from placement of toy on table to infant first touch), duration of touch (total time infants spent touching toy), and imitation score (how many times the infant played with toy) were recorded (Repacholi, 2014). The amount of time the infant looked at the emoter, and the facial expressions of the infant were observed and converted to a quantitative scale using Hertenstein & Campos, 2004 methods during the 20-second time was also recorded. “Anger-attentive and anger-distracted children took significantly longer to touch the objects than anger-back and control, and anger-attentive took significantly longer to touch than anger-absent. Anger-attentive were less likely to imitate than anger-back, anger-absent, and control. Anger-distracted had lower imitation scores than anger-absent and

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