Social Foundations
Founded in 2020.
Dr Robert Hepach
MAIN RESEARCH FOCUS
Prosocial motivations and behaviours that foster social connection and sustain relationships develop early in childhood and support lifelong health outcomes. We study the developmental origins of the psychological mechanisms underlying young children's and young people's helping, sharing, comforting, and cooperation.
Our goal is to better understand how emotions regulate social interactions toward cooperative ends. Our methods include eye tracking, pupillometry, behavioural observations, and posture gait analyses using depth sensor imaging. We are particularly interested in studying how the motivations for specific prosocial behaviours such as instrumental helping change across development. For example, in one line or work we were interested in how children’s intrinsic motivations to help others develop to incorporate strategic motivations to build cooperative relationships with others (Hepach, Engelmann, et al., 2023).
One aspiration of our research programme is to improve children’s and young people’s lives by making their social interactions more rewarding and their relationships more cooperative and meaningful.
CURRENT PROJECTS
Expressions of prosocial emotions
We are interested in how children express (pro)social emotions such as pride, shame, guilt, but also joy. To this end we design studies that allow us to capture the expression of emotions in children as young as 2 to 3 years. One line of work led by Marlene Försterling uses OpenPose and depth sensor imaging technology to measure postural elevation and how this reflects positive and negative emotional experience.
Relevant publications:
Försterling, M., Gerdemann, S., Parkinson, B., & Hepach, R. (2024). Exploring the expression of emotions in children’s body posture using OpenPose. In Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (Vol. 46). [Link to the paper]
Försterling, M., Hepach, R., & Rottman, J. (2023). Context matters in myriad ways: a reply to ‘Building a cooperative child: evidence and lessons cross-culturally’ by Tanya Broesch and Erin Robbins. Global Discourse, 13(3-4), 435-441.
Emotions in childhood Project
We are currently engaged in a unique collaboration with Gameloft and Ferrero Int. to create a knowledge database featuring research on emotions in childhood. This is featured on a website for children and their caretakers. We have worked together with our partners to integrate some of this educational content within an app-based gamified experience that children can play together with the caretakers. The launch of this game on both the Google Play Store and the Apple App store is scheduled for October 2024. We have co-designed the game with our partners to feature educational elements to encourage conversations between children and their caretakers about feelings and emotions in everyday life.
Lab Members
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