Browsing by Author "Vongpaisal, Tara"
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Item Associations among parental attitudes on technology, digital literacy, and children’s learning outcomes in the 2020 pandemic(2021) Hidalgo, Karyl; Vongpaisal, TaraThe purpose of this study was to explore how parents’ digital literacy affected children’s learning outcomes while engaging in online learning in the recent pandemic. Digital literacy is the ability to efficiently use technology, to navigate through different programs comfortably, and to manage information for proper online behaviour. This study focused on the parental perspective of their child’s learning from face-to-face to digital instruction. An online survey was completed by 22 parents with children in grades K-12 attending school in the Edmonton area. The survey explored parents’ digital technology use, their motivation and perspectives on technology in their child’s learning, as well as demographic factors such as ethnicity, digital age, and household income. Students’ school performance was recorded for a number of subject areas. The survey revealed that parents had good digital literacy, access to technology, and positive attitudes on technology for learning. However, some parents reported a lack of their child’s engagement, a desire for greater teacher interaction, and difficulties with balancing parenting and teaching at home. Despite these concerns, detriment to children’s school performance was not observed. The findings shed light on the challenges faced by parents and children’s learning at home in the recent pandemic and have the potential to inform teaching practices that will optimize learning outcomes in online learning settings.Item The influence of interpersonal synchrony on helping behavior, social bonding, and empathy in children(2020) Holt, Mykaela; Vongpaisal, TaraThe current study examines the influence of interpersonal synchrony on typically developing 3-6-year-old children’s empathy and helping behavior. In a replication of a spontaneous helping task developed by Kirschner & Tomasello (2010), fish food is spilt on the way to an imaginary fish tank, creating an opportunity for child participants to help their play partner (adult or same-aged children) at the cost of the immediate gratification of feeding their own fish first. Cognitive and Affective empathy were measured in an emotion assessment task using a 7-point Likert scale. Both helping and empathy measures were assessed before and after the synchronization task, where children clapped to metronome sounds that were either in- or out- of synchrony. It was found that helping behavior and empathy were not significantly higher in the synchrony condition when compared with the asynchronous condition. Furthermore, pairwise comparisons of pre- and post- helping and empathy measures remained unchanged across synchronizing conditions, and no differences in the frequency of eye-contact and smiles¬ were found during the synchronization task. Although a trend emerged wherein children were more likely to help same-aged peers when compared with adult playmates, follow-up studies with modifications to the task are needed to optimize the performance of child playmates. While our findings do not show an effect of synchrony on enhancing the social connections and prosocial abilities in our current sample, further research is needed to explore possible age-related differences that may account for discrepancies observed between the current study and those reported in previous research.Item The influence of interpersonal synchrony on helping behavior, social bonding, and empathy in children(2019) Holt, Mykaela; Vongpaisal, TaraIn the current study the influence of interpersonal synchrony on children’s empathy and helping behavior will be explored in typically developing children ages 3-12 years. In a replication of a spontaneous helping task developed by Kirschner & Tomasello (2010) fish food is spilt on the way to a fish tank, creating an opportunity for helping behaviour to occur at the cost of immediate gratification for the other child. Cognitive and affective empathy will be measured in an emotion assessment task using a 7-point Likert scale. We will also examine how the age of peer playmates affect these outcomes.Item Language effects on emotion recognition in adult listeners(2023) Badiru, Monisola; Vongpaisal, TaraIn an increasingly multicultural society, perception and understanding of emotions expressed by talkers across different languages are important for meaningful and effective social communication. The purpose of this study is to examine language effects on listeners’ ability to recognize emotions, specifically in individuals who speak English as their first language. Adult participants listened to sentences spoken in English and Yorùbá and identified whether the talker was happy, sad, angry, or neutral. Tonal languages such as Yorùbá are characterized by more variance in pitch compared to stress-based languages such as English. Therefore, we predicted that adult participants whose first language is English will have more difficulty recognizing emotions in Yorùbá than in English. The findings of this study will have implications in expanding our knowledge about the perception of emotions in different language contexts. It will also help us understand language effects on emotion recognition in other special populations, including children impacted by hearing loss.Item Prosodic and semantic effects on the perception of mixed emotions in speech(2017) Bubar, Ayslin; Vongpaisal, TaraThe current study examines the perception of mixed happy-sad emotions elicited by a combination of prosodic voice cues (pitch and tempo), and sentence content (semantics) in speech. In the first experiment, participants will rate sentences spoken by a female talker on happiness and sadness using a 7-point Likert scale. In the second experiment, the processing of emotions will be examined using eye-tracking. Participants will watch audio-visual recordings of a female talker speaking a series of sentences and will rate the emotional expressions using the same rating scale. When pitch and tempo cues are consistent with happy and sad expressions, we expect listeners to rate the expressions in accordance with these emotions. However, when voice cues that signal happy and sad emotions are in conflict, they will result in intermediate happiness and sadness ratings, reflecting the perception of mixed happy-sad emotions. We expect that eye-tracking measures will reveal shorter durations of looking time to purely happy or sad emotions in comparison to mixed happy-sad emotions. Furthermore, the semantics of sentence content will reduce the perception of mixed happy-sad emotions evoked in vocal expressions. The findings from the current study are expected to extend our knowledge on the perception of mixed emotions in normal populations and in special populations with social-emotional deficits.