Socio-emotional task data from the UnLocke sample

Mareschal, Denis and Dumontheil, Iroise and Mayer, Sveta

Birkbeck Schools and Research Centres > School of Science > Psychological Sciences

socio-emotional training, theory of mind, emotion recognition, childhood, school

Participants were recruited from state-funded, non-fee-paying primary schools in England and include 5,620 children. Age information is available for most children. Gender information was not available for this sample but the broader randomised control trial evaluation report (Roy et al., 2019) revealed no imbalance in gender between intervention conditions or age groups.

Classes were allocated into three conditions, teaching as usual (TAU, 25% of the sample), Stop and Think intervention (S&T, 50% of the sample) and SEE+ intervention (25%). While the main RCT focused on the evaluation of the Stop & Think intervention on science and maths outcomes (Roy et al., 2019), this dataset relates to additional analyses of the impact of SEE+ on socio-emotional skills.

Socio-emotional cognition was assessed post-training using five custom designed booklets which chlidren completed as a whole class. The first four booklet tasks, required judgements of either other’s emotions, i.e. emotion recognition (ER) or a mental state judgement involving theory of mind (ToM), with either photographs of real face or cartoon face stimuli similar to those used in the interventions.

The booklets were completed in a fixed order (real faces ER, cartoon faces ER, real faces ToM, cartoon faces ToM) to reflect increasing complexity in socio-emotional judgement; each included one practice item and seven test items. The ER task presented children with whole face stimuli of real children or SEE+ characters and asked them to identify which two children out of three (3 items), four (2 items) or six (2 items), as proxy of increasing social groups, looked like they felt the same. The ToM tasks presented children with social situations involving two protagonist interacting with an inanimate object where one of the protagonist’s face is not seen; each item included a set of four face image stimuli of photographs of real children’s faces or SEE+ character faces and children were asked to infer which of these four faces represented what the protagonist whose face they could not see felt in that social situatio. Scores on each booklet ranged from 0 to 7.

The fifth booklet presented a ToM vignette task adapted from Sebastian et al. (2012) to measure children’s first level ToM. On each page, children were shown three images at the top illustrating a story and were asked to choose “What happens next?” between two further images presented at the bottom of the page representing two choices of ending. There was one training item (cognitive ToM) followed by seven test items, which included one physical causality, two cognitive ToM and four affective ToM scenarios. Each vignette scenario portrayed two characters. Affective ToM cartoons required children to infer how one of the characters in the story would react to their companion’s affective state in order to choose the correct ending. Cognitive ToM vignettes required children to make an inference based on the intentions of the story characters. The physical causality item required an understanding of cause and effect. Items were presented in a fixed order across participants. Score on this booklet ranged from 0 to 6; the physical causality item was not included in the analyses.

Roy P, Rutt C, Sims D, Bradshaw S, McNamara S. Stop and Think: Learning counterintuitive concepts [Internet]. National Foundation for Educational Research; 2019. Available from: https://www.nfer.ac.uk/media/uqapkjif/learning_counterintuitive_concepts_evaluation_report_-final.pdf

Sebastian CL, Fontaine NMG, Bird G, Blakemore SJ, De Brito SA, McCrory EJP, et al. Neural processing associated with cognitive and affective Theory of Mind in adolescents and adults. Soc Cogn Affect Neurosci. 2012 Jan;7(1):53–63.

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