Abstract
Person perception is one of several aspects of the first steps in social information-processing, viz, encoding and mental representation of social cues. To study person perception in conduct-disordered boys, we used the method of free person description. First, age-related effects on the various measures of peer descriptions were studied in normal boys. Second, peer descriptions made by oppositional-defiant and conduct-disordered (CD) boys were compared with those made by a normal control (NC) group and a psychiatric control group with internalizing disorders (ID). Just like younger normal boys when compared with older ones, CD boys, when compared with NC boys, perceived their peers more from an egocentric point of view. They paid less attention to the peers' inner, personal worlds, and instead attended more to the peers' external qualities; more specifically they focused more on items relating to the peers' activities with others. In all these respects ID boys took a position in between CD and NC boys without differing significantly from either group. Findings concerning CD boys' representations of peers are discussed with respect to other aspects of mental representation (perspective-taking, empathy) and the effect of these representations on the generation of nonprosocial and antisocial solutions to social problems with peers.
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This research was supported by a grant from the Stichting Kinderpostzegels Nederland. The authors wish to thank Dennis Bromley in Liverpool, England, and John Livesley, Vancouver, Canada, for their advice, Leo Njio in Utrecht, The Netherlands, for his support in data analysis, and two anonymous reviewers for their comments on a draft of this article.
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Matthys, W., Walterbos, W., Van Engeland, H. et al. Conduct-disordered boys' perceptions of their liked peers. Cogn Ther Res 19, 357–372 (1995). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02230405
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02230405