Children Avoid Sick Faces and Improve With Training: A Stage 2 Registered Report.
Children are vulnerable to disease, yet are poor at recognizing and avoiding sickness. We recruited 5–9‐year‐olds (N = 120, 38% female, 60% White, 48% Hispanic/Latine) to test whether children's sickness sensitivity can be improved through training. Children randomly assigned to engage in a game‐bas...
| Publicado en: | Infant & Child Development Vol. 35; no. 4; pp. 1 - 24 |
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| Autores principales: | , , , , , , |
| Formato: | pictorial research tables/charts Journal Article |
| Publicado: |
Wiley-Blackwell
Jul2026
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| Acceso en línea: | Ver este registro en EBSCOhost |
| fields | @attributes: recordID: 1 pdfLink: plink: https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=ccm&AN=196443372&site=ehost-live header: @attributes: shortDbName: ccm uiTerm: 196443372 longDbName: CINAHL Complete uiTag: AN controlInfo: bkinfo: dissinfo: jinfo: jid: 15227227 BW5 jtl: Infant & Child Development issn: 15227227 maglogo: Y pubinfo: dt: Jul2026 vid: 35 iid: 4 pid: 480 pub: Wiley-Blackwell place: Malden, Massachusetts artinfo: ui: 196443372 196443372 196443372 10.1002/icd.70134 196443372 ppf: 1 ppct: 23 formats: tig: atl: Children Avoid Sick Faces and Improve With Training: A Stage 2 Registered Report. aug: au: Leung, Tiffany S. Zeng, Guangyu Maylott, Sarah E. Malik, Arushi Zhang, Shuo Jakobsen, Krisztina V. Simpson, Elizabeth A. affil: Department of Psychology, University of Miami, Coral Gables Florida,, USA sug: subj: Disease Transmission Prevention and Control Avoidance Learning Health Education Disgust Health Knowledge Cognition Human Funding Source Male Female Pretest-Posttest Design Power Analysis Child, Preschool Child United States Videorecording Task Performance and Analysis Calibration T-Tests Chi Square Test Logistic Regression Descriptive Statistics Path Analysis Comparative Studies Sleepiness Correlational Studies Age Factors Scales Child, Preschool: 2-5 years Child: 6-12 years Male Female ab: Children are vulnerable to disease, yet are poor at recognizing and avoiding sickness. We recruited 5–9‐year‐olds (N = 120, 38% female, 60% White, 48% Hispanic/Latine) to test whether children's sickness sensitivity can be improved through training. Children randomly assigned to engage in a game‐based disease training, compared to a control group, showed greater improvement in pre‐ to post‐training sickness avoidance accuracy, reported using facial features of lassitude (e.g., drooping eyelids) more often when trying to determine facial health, and had higher disgust sensitivity. However, we did not find support for our hypothesis that younger children benefitted more from training than older children. These findings suggest that children's sickness sensitivity may be malleable. Developing interventions for children's pathogen avoidance, that account for the flexibility of children's disease detection system, may reduce disease transmission and improve public health. Trial Registration: This study was pre‐registered on the Open Science Framework at https://osf.io/25jx4 and as a https://doi.org/10.1002/icd.70024 Key Points: Children show room for improvement in recognizing and avoiding sick faces, so we tested a method to strengthen this sensitivity.Disease training improved children's facial sickness avoidance accuracy, altered their visual attention to faces, and increased their disgust sensitivity.Disease trained children reported using lassitude facial features—namely the eyes—to make their sickness recognition decisions, similar to adults. pubtype: Academic Journal doctype: pictorial research tables/charts Journal Article ougenre: Article language: English refInfo: holdings: @attributes: islocal: N |
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