Personality traits are stable, dispositional characteristics of individuals that enable us to organize and anticipate events in our social world. During the preschool years, children begin making judgments about other people's personality traits and behaviors and the nature of these judgments has implications for their interpersonal relationships. For example, children who process behavioral information about others inappropriately are perceived as socially incompetent and face peer rejection, which may lead to psychosocial maladjustment later in life. One of the fundamental questions surrounding the personality attribution process concerns the assignment of personal or situational causality for different outcomes of events (person-situation attributions). For example, a child can infer that they were ignored by their peer because their peer is mean (person attribution) or busy (situation attribution). Although person-situation attributions have been examined extensively in adults, there has been little investigation of the use of these factors to make attributions by young children, due in part to the lack of appropriate methodology. Accordingly, the central aims of this project are to (a) identify the extent to which children take into account person or situation factors appropriately in their judgments about the causes of behavior using a novel, developmentally appropriate experimental paradigm;(b) identify distinct profiles of person-situation attributions that may be related to children's psychosocial functioning;and (c) explore the relation between children's person-situation attribution styles and general social and cognitive skills. This research will provide the basis for detecting and understanding social skill deficits and their correlates in early childhood. Detection of information processing deficits at an early age is critical for the development of interventions and training programs that are aimed at improving the quality of children's lives.
The proposed project will take an initial step toward characterizing the nature of young children's judgments about the causes of people's behavior, with the goal of identifying potentially maladaptive profiles of social information processing. Identification and understanding of the mechanisms that are implicated in social judgments is essential for the creation of intervention programs that are aimed at improving the lives of children who experience difficulties intrapersonally (e.g., poor self-concept) and interpersonally (e.g., aggression, peer rejection).
| Boseovski, Janet J; Thurman, Sabrina L (2014) Evaluating and approaching a strange animal: children's trust in informant testimony. Child Dev 85:824-34 |
