Author(s) This pre-registration is currently anonymous to enable blind peer-review. It has 2 authors.
Pre-registered on 2020/12/19 - 02:50 PM (PT)
1) Have any data been collected for this study already? No, no data have been collected for this study yet.
2) What's the main question being asked or hypothesis being tested in this study? The main question is if children and adults distinguish awe-inspiring experiences from other experiences that also induce a sense of small self (i.e., view large crowds of people), in terms of key cognitive, motivational, and emotional aspects.
3) Describe the key dependent variable(s) specifying how they will be measured. We will measure nine key dependent variables (2-8 are presented in a randomized order):
1) The Small-Self: the intensity of participant’s diminished sense of self in comparison to the world
2) Sense of Connectedness: participant’s feeling of being connected to everything in the world
3) Interest in Exploration: participant’s desire to explore unknown things in the world
4) Need for understanding: participant’s feeling of not knowing many things in the world
5) Self-Interest: participant’s feeling of thinking more beyond their usual self-interests
6) Self-Efficacy: participant’s feeling of being able to make their life better
7) Self-Uniqueness: participant’s feeling of being easily replaced by others
8) Self-Aspiration: participant’s feeling of wanting to be nicer and kinder
9) Interest in the experience: which video the participant wants to watch again
Each of the dependent variables will be measured with binary selection questions.
4) How many and which conditions will participants be assigned to? Each participant will watch two videos in a randomized order: an awe-inspiring video involving scenes of grand nature and a comparison video involving scenes of diverse large crowds walking through city streets from different vantage points. All participants will answer questions to the dependent variables after watching both videos.
5) Specify exactly which analyses you will conduct to examine the main question/hypothesis. We will conduct a generalized linear mixed effects model to see if there is a general effect of measure: glmer(response~measure + (1|ID), family=binomial, data=data)
We will also conduct binomial tests to see if participants’ choices significantly differ from chance level (.50) for each measure.
For children's data, we will also explore the effects of age (in years) for each measure. If there is a significant age effect, we will examine younger and older children’s responses separately using median split of age, or examine for each measure whether there is an age effect.
glmer(response~measure*age + (1|ID), family=binomial, data=data)
6) Describe exactly how outliers will be defined and handled, and your precise rule(s) for excluding observations. No participants will be excluded for outliers. Exclusion criteria consist of removing consent or assent, not being in the designated age range, not being a typically developing child, does not complete study or responses being influenced by environmental influences. We will exclude adult participants who fail our attention check or who take too long to complete the study (>30 minutes).
7) How many observations will be collected or what will determine sample size? No need to justify decision, but be precise about exactly how the number will be determined. We will recruit a sample size n of 100 children between the ages of 4 and 9 and n of 100 adults.
8) Anything else you would like to pre-register? (e.g., secondary analyses, variables collected for exploratory purposes, unusual analyses planned?) We may conduct mediation analyses to examine if responses to the small-self measure mediates the effects of condition on the dependent variables, as well as analyzing the condition results controlling for adult participants’ responses to the emotion measures. We’ll also examine the correlations between children’s and adults’ responses to the DVs, as well as the effects of supplemental variables including testing order, gender and race.
