Children's developing understanding of the motivational role of affect: An attributional analysis

Abstract

This research examined children's developing understanding of relations between attributions, affects, and intended social behavior. Three scenarios involving exam success, making a baseball team, and a bicycle collision were constructed to elicit, respectively, either pride, gratitude, or guilt in a target child. In Experiment 1, two story conditions varied the locus (internal or external) of the cause of the outcome in the pride scenario and the controllability of the cause in the gratitude and guilt scenarios. For each condition, children aged 5 to 11 made judgments about the locus or controllability of the cause; they indicated how proud, grateful, or guilty the target child would feel; and they made inferences about an intended action (self-reward, reciprocation, or reparation) that might follow the outcome. In Experiment 2, the causal information and affective information were manipulated in a factorial design, and children made judgments about the intended action. There were age-related increases in the linkages between attributions and affects and between affects and intended behavior. This was particularly true in the case of guilt. These findings were interpreted as evidence for the growing influence of affect as a mediator between causal thought and action.