The recognition and spontaneous use of psychological descriptions by young children

Craig, Gordon; Boyle, Mary E.

doi:10.1111/j.2044-8260.1979.tb00327.x

Cited by 4 publications

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“…Free response techniques like the REP Test make a unique contribution to our understanding of lay descriptions of self and others. Whereas standardized techniques that offer Umited responses reveal what people, when asked, are willing to acknowledge about themselves and others, free response techniques reveal the concepts that spontaneously come to mind when people think about themselves and others in particular contexts (Craig & Boyle, 1979). In addition, exphcit information about "naive psychology" is encoded in the way that laypersons spontaneously describe different sorts of psychological phenomena (Heider, 1958)-or in this case, in the way they describe different personality domains.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…As detailed in Table 1, the categories were defined according to hnguistic criteria that would be easy for coders to agree upon, such as part of speech and the occurrence of key phrases.' In addition, I attempted to define the categories in a way that made the system comparable to those used by Craig and Boyle (1979) and Fiske and Cox (1979) in their studies of person description. Moreover, the final set of structural form categories shows a reasonable degree of convergence with a recent, independently derived category system developed by Prentice (1990).…”

Section: The Present Study and Category Systemmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Do Children Use the Big Five, Too? Content and Structural Form In Personality Description

Donahue

1994

Journal of Personality

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Free personality descriptions generated by 11-year-olds in the Role Construct Repertory Test (Kelly, 1955) were content-analyzed. The children's personality constructs were coded according to structural form (e.g., habits, preferences, traits) and "Big Five" personality content domain (e.g., Agreeableness, Conscientiousness). Findings showed that the children generated constructs from all of the Big Five personality domains. Agreeableness constructs were used most frequently, replicating the prevalence of that domain in studies of adult trait attribution (Peabody & Goldberg, 1989). However, in contrast to adults, less than half of the children's Big Five constructs were expressed as personality traits. The children's use of structural forms varied systematically with the personality domain they were describing. Target likability and age were also found to be related to the personality domains and structural forms of the children's constructs.

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: The Present Study and Category Systemmentioning

confidence: 99%

Do Children Use the Big Five, Too? Content and Structural Form In Personality Description

Donahue

1994

Journal of Personality

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“…In one line of work, researchers have focused on children's descriptions of personality (e.g., Livesley & Bromley, 1973; Peevers & Secord, 1973; Yuill, 1992). Generally, the findings in this area indicate that children begin to use trait terms spontaneously at 7 or 8 years of age (e.g., Craig & Boyle, 1979; Livesley & Bromley, 1973). With increasing age, the trait terms used by children become increasingly differentiated (Livesley & Bromley, 1973), less egocentric (Peevers & Secord, 1973), and more psychologically than behaviorally oriented (Barenboim, 1981; Newman, 1991).…”

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confidence: 99%

Children's use of frequency information for trait categorization and behavioral prediction.

Boseovski¹,

Lee²

2006

Developmental Psychology

161

148

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Two experiments examined young children's use of behavioral frequency information to make behavioral predictions and global personality attributions. In Experiment 1, participants heard about an actor who behaved positively or negatively toward 1 or several recipients. Generally, children did not differentiate their judgments of the actor on the basis of the amount of information provided. In Experiment 2, the actor behaved positively or negatively toward a single recipient once or repeatedly. Participants were more likely to make appropriate predictions and attributions after exposure to multiple target behaviors and with increasing age. Overall, children's performance was influenced by age-related positivity and negativity biases. These findings indicate that frequency information is important for personality judgments but that its use is affected by contextual complexity and information-processing biases.

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Peeking into Personality Test Answers: Inter- and Intraindividual Variety in Item Interpretations

Arro

2012

Integr. psych. behav.

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Personality research of today applies basically inventories having neither unambiguously interpretable items nor responses. The substantive process of generating the test answer is rarely investigated and thus the possible field of meanings, out of which the answer is created, remains hidden. In order to investigate the possible array of spontaneous answers to personality test items, a situative open-ended personality inventory was developed to determine individuals' ways of interpreting personality test items and relevant personality descriptions for individuals. The children's sample (N = 704 of 10-13 year olds) answered five free-response contextualized personality test questions, each related to one of the Five Factor Model personality dimensions. It was revealed that there is no universal interpretation of an item. First, different children's answers to same question described different personality dimensions - substantial number of the respondents' answers did not reflect the personality domain assumed in an item. So there are several ways to interpret test questions; answers may refer to different personality dimensions and not necessarily the one assumed by the researcher. Second, a number of children mentioned more than one personality trait for one item, indicating that even within one person there may be several relevant interpretations of the same item. Considering personality traits as occurring one by one and mutually exclusively during personality test answering may be artificial; in reality trait combinations may reflect actual reaction. In sum, the results suggest there is no single predictable interpretational trajectory in meaning construction process if semiotically mediated constructs, e.g., personality reflection, are assessed.

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The recognition and spontaneous use of psychological descriptions by young children

Cited by 4 publications

References 0 publications

Do Children Use the Big Five, Too? Content and Structural Form In Personality Description

Do Children Use the Big Five, Too? Content and Structural Form In Personality Description

Children's use of frequency information for trait categorization and behavioral prediction.

Peeking into Personality Test Answers: Inter- and Intraindividual Variety in Item Interpretations

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