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The Roles of Behavior, Affect, and Theory of Mind in Children’s Trait Attributions

Fri, April 9, 4:30 to 5:30pm EDT (4:30 to 5:30pm EDT), Virtual

Abstract

Individuals interpret both behavioral and affective cues to form impressions of others. Ames and Johar (2009) demonstrated that adults initially place greater emphasis on affect when making trait attributions, whereas behavioral displays become increasingly important over time. For example, negative affect initially impacted a perceiver's impression of the target after a single episode, yet its influence dissipated after viewing more episodes of consistent, helpful behavior. They also proposed that one’s theory of mind (ToM), or ability to infer mental states, provides a foundation for trait attributions. Indeed, research has connected ToM and trait attributions in early childhood (Bosovski & Lee, 2006; Giles & Heyman, 2005; Liu, Gelman, & Wellman, 2007), yet, to our knowledge, this is the first study to examine the impact of behavioral and affective displays in repeated episodes on young children’s attributions. Thus, the purpose of the present study was to explore whether young children make trait attributions based on behavioral and affective information across repeated episodes, and whether these factors are related to ToM understanding.

One-hundred and fifteen children (ages 3 to 5) completed three types of tasks: language comprehension, false belief, and two trait attribution measures. The trait attribution tasks included five episodes about a helpful child and five episodes about an unhelpful child. Each episode presented a story about a child interacting with his/her classmates on the playground, during free play, or during snack time. Participants were asked to listen to the story and consider what they thought about the character. At the end of each episode, participants saw a picture of the main character, consistent with the affect conveyed by the story (helpful - smiling, unhelpful - looking downward) or inconsistent with the affect conveyed in the story (neutral, unemotional expression) and rated him/her on five characteristics (e.g., helpful, good friend).

A series of ANCOVAs, with language comprehension as the covariate, and age, behavioral cues (helpful versus unhelpful), and affective cues (consistent versus inconsistent) as independent variables revealed several key findings with regard to children’s trait attributions. First, the tendency to use behavioral cues to make trait inferences increased with age, with both 4- and 5-year-olds, but not 3-year-olds, consistently rating helpful characters more positively than unhelpful characters. Second, theory of mind was related to children’s trait attributions, but it did not mediate the relationship between age and trait attributions. Third, providing additional behavioral and affective information (repeated over the 5 episodes) affected 4-year-olds’ positive trait attributions. For the helpful conditions, 4-year-olds’ ratings were more positive with repeated helpful acts. The ratings of the 3- and 5-year-olds did not differ across episodes. For the unhelpful conditions, children rated the character less positively as they received more information about the character’s unhelpful behavior. Thus, facial expression impacted 4-year-olds’ ratings of helpful characters, whereas consistency in behavior affected 3- through 5-year-olds’ positivity ratings of unhelpful characters. The implications of the findings for the importance of early theory of mind understanding and children’s use of behavioral cues when developing trait attributions will be discussed.

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