Children’s Honesty And Self-Awareness

Children’s lying behavior is not only the concern of parents, teachers and other educators, but also the focus of attention of many psychology researchers. In order to effectively suppress the child’s lying behavior and promote the cultivation of children’s honesty, psychology researchers have spent a lot of efforts in empirical research for exploring honesty promotion strategies, such as,.self-awareness, commitment, symbolic modeling. This study aims to verify whether the mirror and peer image settings are able to effectively promote preschool children’s honest behavior, and the effects of these two experimental conditions on the facial expression of liars and the innocent.The study consist of two experiments which adopt between-subject design with different experimental conditions as between-subject variable and children’s target behavior(peeking and lying) and facial expression as dependent variables. Two experiments were performed using the classic research paradigm for lie-telling, temptation resistance procedure which is called "listen and guess" game. In the game, children were asked to not to peek at a toy when the experimenter is absent and were asked about whether they Children’s executive functioning, and theory-of-mind understanding were assessed. Parenting styles of these children’s parents were also investigated with Parental Authority Questionnaire-Revised (PAQ-R). In Experiment 1, in order to examine whether the setting of mirror was able to significantly reduce the rate of children’s lying, half of children were assigned to the mirror group and half to the control group. In the mirror group, the children were asked to look at themselves in the mirror; in the control group, the children were asked to point out the objects in the room. In Experiment 2, in order to examine whether the setting of peer image was able to significantly reduce the rate of children’s lying. In the peer group, the children were asked to look at a photo of a strange child with the same size as the mirror. During the game, the children’s facial expressions were shot with a hidden camera. After the videos of facial expressions being edited, they were imported into the iMotion 5.7 software and processed using Emotiont FACET procedure.The results showed that:1. The setting of a mirror which caused high private self-awareness can effectively inhibit the lying behavior of children;2. The setting of a peer photo which caused high public self-awareness was unable to inhibit the lying behavior in children effectively;3. Compared with the control group of children, the facial expressions of the mirror group and the peer group were more negative;...