Elsevier

Cognitive Development

Volume 14, Issue 3, July–September 1999, Pages 401-422
Cognitive Development

Predictors of Preschoolers' Self-Knowledge: Reference to Emotion and Mental States in Mother-Child Conversation about Past Events

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Abstract

Reference to emotion and mental states were expected to predict the organization of children's self-knowledge. Thirty-three 3.5- to 4.5-year-olds (17 females and 15 males) discussed 4 past events with their mothers. Conversations were coded for emotional content and reference to mental states. Children completed the Children's Self-View Questionnaire (CSVQ; Eder, 1990). Organization of self-knowledge was defined as the consistency with which children rated themselves as either high or low with respect to the dispositions indexed by the CSVQ. Hierarchical multiple regression showed that reference to emotion was a significant predictor of organization scores after controlling for linguistic skill, but that mental state reference was not. Mothers initiated talk about emotion more often than their children did. The results are consistent with theories of the early social construction of the self-concept and have implications for developing models of autobiographical memory.

Section snippets

Conversation about Emotion and References to Mental States

Mothers and children communicate about emotions as early as the second year of life Beeghley, Bretherton, & Mervis 1986, Dunn et al. 1987. By age 2, children refer to past, present, and future emotional states (e.g., Wellman, Harris, Banerjee, & Sinclair, 1995). Early family discussion of emotion predicts children's later references to feelings and understanding of emotions Dunn et al. 1987, Dunn, Brown, & Beardsall 1991, Dunn, Brown, Slomkowski, Tesla, & Youngblade 1991. Moreover, mothers who

The Measurement of Self-Knowledge

Although many theorists have proposed that mother-child conversation may be related to the development of self-knowledge, this relation has not been examined empirically using an independent measure of children's self-views. One difficulty in studying this relation, and in particular a difficulty in studying the psychological self-concepts of young children, lies in the verbal nature of self-concept measures. Studies in which children described themselves in response to open-ended questions,

Hypotheses

In this research, the amount that mothers and children referred to emotions and to mental states was expected to predict the degree to which children showed a firm sense of their psychological qualities, regardless of what the particular contents of these qualities were. That is, according to the conceptual framework outlined earlier, the degree to which mothers and children engaged in talk about the subjective experiences of emotions and other mental states should contribute to knowing about

Participants

Forty-eight mothers and their children (3 1/2- to 4 1/2-year-olds) were selected randomly from a database of previous participants who had been recruited from newspaper advertisements and letters distributed at local child care centers. None of the participants had been involved in a similar study. Most of the families were white and middle class. Fifteen children (7 females and 8 males, mean age = 45.66 months) did not complete the CSVQ either because they did not want to leave their mothers

Results

Table 2 shows descriptive statistics for the dependent variables. Some studies show that mothers of girls talk about emotions differently than do mothers of boys and that girls talk about emotions differently than boys do (e.g., Adams, Kuebli, Boyle, & Fivush 1995, Bretherton, Fritz, Zahn-Waxler, & Ridgeway 1986, Dunn et al. 1987, Fivush 1993, Kuebli & Fivush 1992). Moreover, at least one study shows that girls refer to mental states during mother-child conversations about past events more

Discussion

This study showed that the amount that mothers and children refer to emotion in conversation about past events predicts the organization of children's self-knowledge. Thus, these findings establish a link between the content of mother-child conversation and the structure of children's self-views that is consistent with theories about the socialization of the self-concept (e.g., Bruner 1987, Fivush 1993, Nelson 1996). The fact that mothers initiated conversation about emotion more often than

Acknowledgements

We thank Susan Haight and Mary Parkin for assisting with data collection, and Robin Wohlwend for assisting with coding. We are grateful to Scott A. Miller for his helpful comments on earlier drafts of this manuscript. Preparation of this article was supported by a National Institute of Child Health and Human Development predoctoral traineeship awarded to the Department of Psychology, University of Florida (National Research Service Award T32HD07318).

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