Children Avoid Sick Faces and Improve With Training: A Stage 2 Registered Report

Abstract

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