The power of personalization: using a personalized storybook depicting a cross-group friendship to improve White children’s attitudes, feelings, and behaviors toward Black and Hispanic peers

Doctor of PhilosophyDepartment of Psychological SciencesMark A. BarnettIn the current study, 141 White third- and fourth-grade children were asked to provide their attitudes, feelings, and behaviors toward White, Black, and Hispanic peers several days before and after being read a personalized or non-personalized storybook that depicted the children, themselves (personalized) or an unfamiliar White character (non-personalized), in a cross- or same-race friendship with a target Black (cross-race) or White (same-race) storybook character. Further, children were asked to provide their attitudes, feelings, and behaviors toward the target Black or White storybook character immediately before and after being read the storybook, and report how much they felt imaginatively transported into the narrative of the story after being read the storybook. In general, and consistent with Harwood’s (2010) two-dimensional framework of contact space, it was predicted that a personalized storybook that depicted the children, themselves, in a cross-race friendship with a Black storybook character would be more effective than a non-personalized version of the storybook at improving their ratings of the Black storybook character as well as their attitudes, feelings, and behaviors toward the Black and Hispanic peers. Although analyses of the data yielded several interesting findings, no support was found for the main predictions involving the potential impact of a personalized storybook on White children's ratings of the Black storybook character, Black peers, and Hispanic peers. In fact, the only significant effect of the personalization of the storybook that merits attention involved the children’s imaginative transportation into the cross-race friendship story. Specifically, and consistent with prediction, children in the cross-race friendship storybook condition reported feeling more imaginatively transported into the narrative of the storybook when it was personalized than when it was not personalized. In sum, although personalization was indeed “powerful” in elevating White children’s imaginative transportation into a storybook that depicted a cross-race friendship, it was not powerful enough to influence their attitudes, feelings, and behaviors toward the Black storybook character, the Black peers, or the Hispanic peers. The implications and limitations of the present study, as well as directions for future research, are addressed

Role of fault attributions and desire/effort/outcome expectations in children’s anticipated responses to hypothetical peers with various undesirable characteristics

A total of 137 third- through eighth-grade students were asked to respond to a series of statements concerning six male peers described as having various undesirable characteristics (i.e., poor student, poor athlete, extremely overweight, extremely aggressive, extremely shy, or having the symptoms of ADHD). The aggressive peer and the overweight peer consistently elicited the least favorable reactions from the children. For all six peers included in the study, the more strongly the children agreed that a peer was at fault for his undesirable characteristic, the less favorably they anticipated responding to that peer. In contrast, the children’s expectations concerning a peer’s desire to change, effort to change, and success in changing an undesirable characteristic were generally unrelated to their anticipated responses to that peer. The children demonstrated the general belief that desire backed by effort leads to success in overcoming an undesirable characteristic, but lack of effort leads to failure regardless of the peer’s desire or lack of desire to change the characteristic

Factors associated with early adolescents’ anticipated emotional and behavioral responses to ambiguous teases on Facebook

A total of 69 sixth- through eighth-grade students rated their experiences with antisocial and prosocial teases as well as their general attitudes toward teases. Subsequently, the participants read hard copies of four ambiguous teases, one at a time, posted on a simulation of “their” Facebook wall by four different, hypothetical acquaintances. After reading each tease, the participants were asked to complete a questionnaire that assessed their emotional and behavioral response to the tease. Consistent with Weiner's (1980, 1995) cognitive (attribution)-emotion-action model of motivated behavior, path analyses revealed that the participants’ negative experiences with teases and negative attitudes toward teases were predictive of a negative emotional response to the ambiguous teases on Facebook which, in turn, was predictive of various negative behavioral responses to the ambiguous teasers. Therefore, consistent with the prior finding of a hostile attribution bias in some children’s reactions to ambiguous face-to-face teases (Barnett, Barlett, Livengood, Murphy, & Brewton, 2010), the early adolescents in the present study with relatively negative experiences with and attitudes toward teases appear to display a hostile attribution bias whereby teases on Facebook with an uncertain intent are viewed as if they were meant to be antagonistic and antisocial