Poster #207 - Mother-Child Conversations About Other People: The Role of Mothers’ Personal Intelligence

• In Event: 3-106 - Poster Session 11
  In Poster Session: PS 11 Section - Social, Emotional, Personality

Integrative Statement

Personal intelligence concerns the capacity to reason about personality in oneself and others (Mayer, Panter, & Caruso; 2012, 2017a). Research on the intelligence has focused almost exclusively on adults where it is associated with better interpersonal relationships and better reasoning in specific academic contexts (Mayer & Skimmyhorn, 2017; Sylaska, 2016). Yet such advantages in comprehension may begin in childhood. Children’s social interaction—in particular conversations with others—may support and reflect their growing understanding of personality (Boseovski, Shallwani, & Lee, 2009; Carpendale & Lewis, 2004; Gonzalez, Zosuls, & Ruble, 2010).

The current study focused on an unexplored question: Are variations in mothers’ personal intelligence manifested in the way they talk with their children about peoples’ personalities? Further, do mothers who have rich conversations about peoples’ personalities have children who do so as well? The characteristics of daily parent-child conversation have been shown to vary across dyads and contribute to children’s memory, social and emotional development (e.g., Fivush, 1991; Fivush & Wang, 2005; Leichtman, Pillemer, Wang, Koreishi, & Han, 2000; Song & Wang, 2013), but no prior studies have focused on parent-child talk about personality.

Participants were 85 mother-child dyads; 42 children were 4-5 year-olds (younger cohort, mean age = 58.57 months) and 43 were 7-8 year-olds (older cohort, mean age = 96.47). Mothers first recorded a conversation with their children at home. They conversed in whatever way was natural to them with no time limit about the following topics: a relative the child knew well, the child herself, a positive interaction between the child and a peer, and a negative interaction between the child and a peer. Next, mothers completed an online demographic questionnaire and a short form of the Test of Personal Intelligence, the MINI-12, that correlates r = .78 with the full-length test of the ability to reason about the personality of oneself and other people; Mayer, Panter & Caruso, 2017b

Conversations were transcribed and mothers’ and children’s speech was coded for personality talk and variables adapted from previous studies of reminiscence (e.g., Fivush, 1991; Song & Wang, 2013), including elaborations (addition of new information), evaluations (confirming or denying information), and emotion talk. Results indicated significant correlations among mothers’ conversational variables, among children’s conversational variables, and between the conversation variables of mothers and their children, suggesting reliable individual differences and a tendency for mothers and their children to converse in similar ways. Most strikingly, there was a significant positive correlation between mothers’ personal intelligence levels measured by the TOPI MINI-12 and their personality talk with their children (see Tables 1 and 2 for correlations). These findings were consistent for both older and younger cohorts, and remained significant when controlling for conversation length. The findings suggest that parent-child conversations may be an early channel through which parents teach their children how to think and talk about concepts around personality, and that the way they do so is influenced by their own ability to reason about personality.

Authors

• Erin Marie Kenney, Salem State University
  Presenting Author

• Michelle D Leichtman, University of New Hampshire
  Non-Presenting Author

• John D. Mayer, University of New Hampshire
  Non-Presenting Author