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The present study is a theoretical and methodological proposal rooted in the field of social developmental psychology and describes three objectives. First, it aims to show how transgressive situations are conducive to study of social norms governing interactions. Second, the similarities and differences between two emotions, namely shame and embarrassment, are outlined in order to better understand how their respective measures can highlight social norms in interactions. Third, we illustrate our proposal to study social norms through emotional reactions by presenting an ongoing experiment, that examines how children may react to a power situation., Le présent travail est une proposition théorique et méthodologique ancrée dans le champ de la psychologie sociale du développement. Il se donne trois principaux objectifs. D’abord, il s’agira de montrer comment les situations de transgressions sont propices à l’étude des normes sociales régissant les interactions. Ensuite, en explicitant les similitudes et les différences entre deux émotions émergentes en situation (i.e., honte et embarras), on verra comment leurs mesures respectives peuvent constituer d’astucieux outils pour mettre en lumière des normes sociales à l’œuvre lors d’interactions. Enfin, une recherche en cours, menée auprès d’enfants dans le cas où une asymétrie de pouvoir est établie entre protagonistes, sera présentée afin d’exemplifier cette proposition méthodologique.

Gender studies have largely described social practices that lead to an imbalance of power between girls and boys during childhood. However, little is known about how children represent asymmetries in mixed-gender relationships. Do they expect that males are more likely to exert power on females than vice versa? And if so, does this awareness change depending on children’s age, gender, or the country in which they grow up? We present herein an empirical study, recently published in Sex Roles , that addresses these issues. This study included 3- to 6-year-old children, and showed that children from different countries (Norway, Lebanon, France) associate power and masculinity, although it also indicates that girls are less inclined than boys to make this association. We then discuss the worries that children’s beliefs of a gendered power may elicit., Les études de genre ont largement décrit les pratiques sociales qui conduisent, dès l’enfance, à un déséquilibre de pouvoir entre les filles et les garçons. On sait cependant peu de choses sur la manière dont les enfants eux-mêmes se représentent ce déséquilibre. Ont-ils la conscience de la fréquence plus importante du pouvoir masculin ? Et si oui, cette conscience change-t-elle en fonction de l’âge, du genre de l’enfant ou du pays dans lequel il grandit ? Afin de répondre à ces questions, nous présentons et discutons une étude empirique récente, qui montre que, dès 4 ans, des enfants issus de pays différents (Norvège, Liban, France) associent pouvoir et masculinité, mais que les filles sont moins enclines que les garçons à faire cette association. Nous examinons ensuite les craintes que les croyances enfantines d’un pouvoir genré peuvent susciter.

International audience; AbstractNavigating the social world requires evaluating how others behave, communicate and feel. Children show signs of social evaluation from an early age by preferring those who are familiar, those who are similar to themselves as well as those displaying moral behaviour. In the current study, we investigate whether another key dimension of the social environment-social dominance-influences preschool-ers preferences. Research shows that preschoolers understand such relations and use them to make social inferences. Less is known about their preferences towards dominant and subordinate individuals. We carried out two experiments. Experiment 1 presented 4-and 5-year-old children with a dominance scenario in which one dominant character twice imposed his/her will on a subordinate. The results showed that the children did not reveal a preference for one character over the other. In Experiment 2, 3-to 5-year-old children were presented with more explicit dominance interactions involving puppets in a decision power scenario (similar to Experiment 1's) and in a play-fight scenario. In the decision power situation, only the 3-year-olds revealed a preference for the dominant; also, boys were more likely to prefer the dominant than girls. In the play-fight scenario a slight preference emerges for the puppet that prevailed in the fight.

This study investigates the time-course of perspective taking during reference resolution (Keysar et al. 2000; Hanna et al., 2003; Barr, 2008), but here, instead of an utterance containing a direct reference to an object (e.g. "click on the upside-down funnel"), speakers refer to objects using an utterance containing a negation (e.g."click on the one that is not the shiny cylinder"). Because listeners hear a negation, the process of recognizing the intended referent is free from the influence of bottom-up processes that can bias the interpretation toward one referent in the domain, like priming or some other automatic activation of speaker-specific word representations. These bottom-up processes have been proposed as the main mechanisms for early speaker-specific effects in interpreting referential expressions (Brennan & Hanna, 2009; Brown-Schmidt, 2009).