developing social brain

Sarah-Jayne Blakemore(2010)

The Developing Brain: Implications for Education

Neuron, 65, 6, 744-747

P2 ‘ We are constantly reading each others’ actions, gestures and faces in terms of underlying mental states and emotions, in an attempt to figure out what other people are thinking and feeling, and what they are about to do next’

Age 4 ‘ children begin explicitly to understand that others can hold a belief that is different from their own’

Refers to Kuhl work on language learning and video

P3

‘ What is so special about social interaction with a real person is not yet understood. One possibility is that social interaction increases infants’ motivation through enhanced attention and arousal. Social interaction also directs the adult trainer to focus on the learner’s individual needs and tailors the training content for the learner. In addition, by nine months, infants start to understand that pointing to, or looking in the direction of an object indicates that this object is being referred to (KRO Multi modality). This is one of the first building blocks of theory of mind’

examples of mentalizing

· understanding irony ( separating the literal from the intended meaning)

· thinking about ones own intentions

· thinking about social emotions such as guilt and embarrassment

We need to ask whether online social networking, which is particularly important with teenagers, is the same as real live interaction, or whether it might be denying the developing brain of important real-life interactions. There is yet no research on this important question. What is the critical factor in social interaction that is so evidently missing from video conferencing, and which makes it incomparable to a meeting with real people? Being able to ascertain whether or not involuntary emotional expression occurs and if so when is a critical piece of evidence for this debate.’

CDR week by week

Week : Interpretation

How to understand what we are researching. Layer interpretation on interpretation.

positivism - value neutral - there is an objective world out there.  The researcher needs to abandon any preconceptions.

interpretivist approach - social construction of reality.  eg an ethnic group is not an ethnic group because of skin colour, behavioral disposition but because the people 'in it' and the people 'out of it' treat it as an ethnic group.  ie the ethnic group emerges from the interactions and social practices that constitute social life.

Because everything is a matter of interpretation there is no way of deciding whether one set of interpretations are better than another.  However, as a researcher we will still need to make judgements.

realism - there is an external world that is knowable.

neorealism - while there is a real external world, we can never actually step outside our interpretive practices to know it.

relativism - used to describe those who view the idea that there is an objective world out there as unhelpful

normative view of the world - meaning and community - reaching an interpretation of something involves orientating to conventions of existing practice  and making sense of the world from the points of view that fellow community members do.

description or interpretation

'there are those who are reluctant to do much more than providing a description of an event, on the basis that going beyond the data involves substituting one view of the world for another (eg ethnomethodologists).  On the other hand there are those who argue that description alone is not enough and that any detailed investigation must involve an attempt to 'get behind' the rationales for action provided by participants and to interpret the reasons why certain events occur in the way that they do.  In this way theory plays a strong role in enabling researchers to extrapolate'

positivist steer between type 1 and type 2 error

interpretivist steer between over and under interpretation

re Hughes, E. (1993) The Sociological Eye for a good description of social construction