Undergraduate Honors Thesis Projects
Date of Award
Spring 4-16-2020
Document Type
Honors Paper
Degree Name
Psychology-BS
Department
Psychology
Advisor
Dr. Meredith Meyer
First Committee Member
Dr. Meredith Meyer
Second Committee Member
Dr. Cindy Laurie-Rose
Third Committee Member
Louise Captein
Keywords
Psychology, Emotional Learning, Children, Tablet App, Interactive Devices
Subject Categories
Child Psychology | Developmental Psychology
Abstract
As the popularity of child-friendly tablet-based apps and games has grown, the need to evaluate the effects of tablet play has also developed. The current study used an app designed for children ages two to five years called “Daniel Tiger’s Grr-ific Feelings” to examine whether prosocial interactive media can be beneficial for emotional development. The present study was modeled after a study by Rasmussen et al. (2018), wherein children ages three and four years spent two weeks with an experimenter- adapted version of the same app. This experimenter adaptation consisted of limiting children’s access to a subset of the available games. Similar to this prior study, the present study also investigated the efficacy of this interactive media (specifically its efficacy in learning emotional skills, such as emotion recognition and emotion understanding). However, unlike the prior study, this study allowed children to access all features of the app to see if the results found by Rasmussen et al. (2018) replicate, and to improve ecological validity. This study also contained a parental interaction component, whereby some children were assigned to a condition in which parents were encouraged to interact with their child during app usage, and some children were assigned to a condition in which parents were encouraged to allow their child to independently use the app. Regardless of parent interaction, children’s emotion recognition scores increased after app interaction, but their emotion understanding scores did not. These findings suggest that young children can learn basic emotional skills using educational apps without the requirement of parental interaction, and that they can transfer that learning.
Recommended Citation
Rosneck, Kathleen, "The Effect of Parental Interaction on Emotional Learning with Interactive Devices in Children Ages Three to Five" (2020). Undergraduate Honors Thesis Projects. 110.
https://digitalcommons.otterbein.edu/stu_honor/110