Predictors of Preschoolers' Self-Knowledge

Cognitive Development, 14, 401–422 (1999) ISSN 0885-2014

© 1999 Elsevier Science Inc. All rights of reproduction reserved.

Predictors of Preschoolers’ Self-Knowledge: Reference to Emotion and Mental States in Mother-Child Conversation about Past Events Melissa K. Welch-Ross Georgia State University, Atlanta, GA, USA

Lauren G. Fasig Society for Research in Child Development, Washington, D.C., USA

M. Jeffrey Farrar University of Florida, Gainesville, FL, USA 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 selfconcept and have implications for developing models of autobiographical memory.

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). Direct all correspondence to: Melissa K. Welch-Ross, Department of Psychology, University Plaza, Georgia State University, Atlanta, GA 30303;E-mail: [email protected] Manuscript received April 9, 1998; revision accepted June 17, 1999

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The psychological self-concept develops during the preschool years and includes knowledge of one’s particular preferences, typical patterns of emotional expression, and typical ways of appraising people and situations (Damon & Hart, 1988; Eder, 1989, 1990). Many theorists assume that the development of the psychological self-concept is a social process (Bruner, 1987; Damon & Hart, 1988; Mead, 1934). In particular, the conversations that children have with significant others are hypothesized to foster the emergence and shape the content of their self-perceptions (e.g., Fivush, 1988; Miller, 1994; Miller, Mintz, Hoogstra, Fung, & Potts, 1992; Nelson, 1996; Radke-Yarrow, Belmont, Nottelmann, & Bottomly, 1988; Sperry & Smiley, 1995). The goal of this study was to determine if the emotional content of mother-child conversations about past events and references made to mental states during these conversations predict the organization of selfknowledge.

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, Bretherton, & Munn, 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 emphasize the emotional aspects of past experiences have children who learn to talk about, and perhaps represent, past events in terms of their emotional meanings (Fivush, 1993; Fivush & Kuebli, 1997; Kuebli, Butler, & Fivush, 1995). For example, longitudinal data has shown that the amount that mothers talked about past emotions with their 40month-old children predicted the amount that these children talked about the emotional aspects of past events at age 58 months (Fivush, 1993; Fivush & Kuebli, 1997; Kuebli et al., 1995). Several theorists have proposed on the basis of such findings that family conversations about emotion probably play a critical role in the social construction of children’s self-perceptions during the preschool years (Dunn et al., 1987; Dunn, Brown & Beardsall, 1991; Fivush, 1993; Fivush & Kuebli, 1997; Kuebli et al., 1995; Miller, 1994). Discussing the emotional aspects of past events might provide children with evaluative frameworks for labeling and interpreting their personal experiences (Fivush, 1993, 1994). As a result, one expectation would be that the children of mothers who emphasize emotions should possess more detailed, organized knowledge about how they should and typically do evaluate and respond to people and situations than the children of mothers who do not (Fivush, 1993). These children would recognize that “I am a person who is sad a lot,” or “I am a person who has fun around people,” better than children of mothers who

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talk about emotions less often. Thus, early conversation about past emotions may be a process through which children construct meaningful representations of themselves. Mother-child discussion of past emotions, as opposed to present emotions, may be particularly important to the development of self-understanding (Dunn, Brown, & Beardsall, 1991; Fivush, 1993; Fivush & Kuebli, 1997). Knowledge of the self is represented through memories of past personal experiences (Nelson, 1993). These memories contribute to a sense of self that is continuous across time (for further discussion, see Fivush, 1988). Mother-child discussions that focus on the emotional relevance of children’s experiences highlight the personal meaning of past events, which are then explicitly available for children to incorporate into their autobiographical narratives and, therefore, into their self-concepts. Moreover, children may reflect on the meaning that past events have for the self when emotions are discussed in the context of reminiscing more than during the actual experiencing of the emotion (Dunn et al., 1987; Fivush, 1993). In addition to the amount of discussion that mothers and children engage in about the emotional meaning of past events, particular types of reference to emotion are more likely than other types to predict children’s self-knowledge. When talking with children about the past, parents focus most of their references to emotion on the emotional experiences of the child (Fivush, 1993; Kuebli et al., 1995). Further, children appear to be more interested in conversations that focus on themselves than in conversations that focus on others. For example, in one study, children were four times more likely to contribute to naturally occurring stories that mothers told about them in their presence when these children were the protagonists of the stories than when other people were the protagonists (Miller, Potts, Fung, Hoogstra, & Mintz, 1990). Therefore, conversations that focus on children’s own emotional experiences may construct their self-perceptions to a greater degree than conversations that focus on the emotional experiences of other people. Also, discussions about the emotional aspects of the activities that children engage in may be more critical for constructing knowledge about the self than are discussions about the emotional experiences of others. For example, mothers could emphasize that the activity of playing with others in a swimming pool was fun, or that losing a game played at a birthday party was not fun. These conversations inform children of the personal value of the events they have experienced and, therefore, of how to conceptualize these events in relation to the self. Reference to emotion provides explicit information about the particular kinds of evaluations that should be placed on events. However, references to other mental states that are not explicit, emotional evaluations, such as references to thoughts, opinions, beliefs, and desires, may also contribute to the development of a subjective framework for representing the past and constructing self-knowledge. Reference to mental states focuses attention explicitly on a person’s representation of the past, including the aspects of events a person believes to be true and the personal perspectives that are worth remembering. Two- and 3-year-olds

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begin referring to desires as part of their earliest references to subjective experience (Bartsch & Wellman, 1995). As children grow older, they refer to thinking, believing, and knowing with increasing frequency (Bartsch & Wellman, 1995). Moreover, the amount that mothers use mental state terms in everyday conversation with their 2-year-olds is related positively to the amount that children refer to mental states at ages 3 and 4 and to children’s comprehension of mental state terms at age 4 (Furrow, Moore, Davidge, & Chiasson, 1992; Moore, Furrow, Chiasson, & Patriquin, 1994). References to mental states during conversation about past events may highlight the fact that people have subjective representations or mental attitudes toward shared events. Children learn that they have representations of the past that may or may not be shared with others. Over time, these mental state references may play a role in organizing children’s understanding of their own personal orientation toward experience. Thus, we hypothesized that individual differences in the frequency of mother-child references to mental states would predict individual differences in children’s self-knowledge.

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 openended questions, such as “What kind of person are you?” (see Damon & Hart, 1988, for a review), indicated that preschoolers have limited conceptual knowledge of the psychological attributes of the self (for further discussion, see Eder, 1989, 1990). For example, in response to open-ended questions, 4- and 5-year-olds typically identified their perceived abilities, personal possessions, and physical attributes or referred to single emotional states such as, “I am happy.” In contrast to the self-descriptions of preschoolers, children in middle childhood characterized themselves in terms of psychological concepts, such as personality traits, and integrated multiple aspects of their self-knowledge that included social comparisons and interpersonal implications of their personalities. Studies in which more structured response formats have been used to assess self-knowledge, however, indicate that young children do possess conceptual knowledge of the self that is organized along psychological dimensions, although they may not have the verbal skills to convey this conceptual understanding (Eder, 1989, 1990). For example, Eder (1990) examined the self-perceptions of 3 1/2-, 5 1/2-, and 7 1/2-year-olds using the Children’s Self-View Questionnaire (CSVQ). This questionnaire indexes self-knowledge with respect to 10 dispositional constructs, such as aggression and achievement. Eder presented pairs of

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opposing statements to children that described a variety of behaviors, preferences, and emotional reactions to people and situations, corresponding to each of the 10 constructs (e.g., “I like to tease people,” and “I don’t like to tease people”). Children chose which one of the pair of statements best described themselves. Factor analyses revealed that children endorsed statements in an organized manner rather than choosing items randomly (Eder, 1990). For example, a factor labeled Self-Control indicated that children who chose an item indicative of low Aggression, such as “I don’t like to tease people,” were also likely to choose other items indicative of low Aggression, such as “I don’t ever try to push in front of people in line.” The same children also chose items indicative of high Harm Avoidance, such as “I don’t climb up on things that are high.” These results showed that children possess organized, conceptual knowledge of the psychological self during the preschool years.

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 the self—an understanding that is conceptually distinct from the particular content of that self-view. Clearly, one might expect that frequent mother-child references to emotion and mental states may relate to the development of a child’s particular qualities, such as being highly self-controlled, and thus to the development of a child’s perception of the self as having particular qualities, such as a perception of the self as self-controlled. However, the content of the child’s self-view was not the focus of this research. Rather, the assumption was that children who engage in frequent talk with mothers about subjective experiences relating to their own personal pasts should have opinions on the matter of what they are like (e.g., whether they are self-controlled or not) to a greater degree than do children who do not engage in such talk and therefore should have less coherent points of view about where they stand with respect to various psychological qualities. Thus, we were interested in the organization, rather than the content, of children’s self-knowledge. We defined organized self-knowledge as a coherent representation of the psychological qualities of the self that enables children to determine consistently whether behaviors that are indicative of particular psychological constructs, such as self-control, describe them or not. To measure this type of understanding, we obtained an index of self-knowledge using Eder’s (1990) CSVQ that captured the organization of children’s selfviews rather than simply the content of those views. In particular, organized self-

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knowledge was operationalized as the degree to which children consistently endorsed behaviors that were indicative of particular psychological qualities that Eder (1990) showed to be meaningful to preschoolers, regardless of the particular disposition children described. Thus, continuing with the example of self-control, in this study both the child who endorsed many behaviors that were indicative of high self-control and the child who endorsed many behaviors that were indicative of low self-control would be credited with organized self-knowledge. The goal of this research was to determine if the amount that mothers and children referred to emotions and to mental states in conversation predicts the organization of children’s self-knowledge. References to emotion convey explicitly the affective qualities of personal evaluation more than do references to mental states. Therefore, each type of reference was expected to account for unique variance in selfknowledge scores.

METHOD 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 5 45.66 months) did not complete the CSVQ either because they did not want to leave their mothers to enter the observation room or because their attention span was limited. Data for one dyad were omitted because 47% of the mother-child conversation referred to emotion. Examination of histograms and residual plots showed that this data point was an outlier relative to the rest of the sample. Therefore, the final sample consisted of 32 mothers and their children (mean age 5 49.12 months). The sample included 17 females (mean age 5 47.93 months; range 5 41–56) and 16 males (mean age 5 51.36 months; range 5 42–56).

Procedure Session 1. Two female research assistants visited participants in their homes. Mothers were told prior to the visit that the focus of the study was on conversations that parents and children have about the past. Mothers and children discussed four events that the researchers selected to elicit a range of emotional responses: a visit to the dentist or doctor, a family outing, a special occasion, and a time when children had been separated from their mothers. Typical discussion topics included visiting Disney World, attending a birthday party at the Fun Factory or McDonalds, or staying with a caregiver while parents vacationed alone.

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Mothers were instructed to discuss one particular event and not to discuss routine separations (e.g., children attending school) or the routine aspects of visiting the doctor or attending a birthday party. Children and their mothers discussed these events alone while the researchers waited in another room. A time limit was not placed on the length of the conversations. Mothers audiotaped the conversations, which lasted approximately 20 minutes. Session 2. One week later, children and their mothers visited a laboratory playroom. Children completed the Children’s Self-View Questionnaire (Eder, 1990), which consists of 62 items that are presented in a puppet show (Appendix A). For each of the items, one puppet endorses a dispositional statement, and a second puppet endorses an opposite statement (e.g., when one puppet says, “I mostly do things that are hard,” the other puppet says, “I mostly do things that are easy”). Children then identify which puppet is most like them. A research assistant who served as a guide greeted the participants and played with the children until they appeared comfortable. The guide then invited children into the observation room to watch a puppet show. Two research assistants who operated the puppets sat behind a screen and greeted children as they entered the room. The guide introduced children to the two puppets, a frog and a monkey, which the guide addressed as being the same gender as the participant (e.g., Miss Frog and Miss Monkey). Children sat in a chair in front of the screen, and the guide sat behind the child. The puppets asked children if they would like to play a game and provided the following instructions: “In this game, we’re going to tell you about ourselves, and then we’re going to ask you all about yourself. Here’s how you play the game.” The puppets described themselves in two practice trials. For example, Miss Frog said, “I like ice cream,” and Miss Monkey said, “I don’t like ice cream.” The child was then asked, “How about you?” The guide prompted the children, who responded by nodding their heads “yes” or “no” either to indicate verbally or to point to the puppet that was most like themselves. Target trials immediately followed practice trials. The guide recorded children’s responses. Any target trials for which children responded “I don’t know” were repeated after the last item on the questionnaire was presented. The type of statement a puppet endorsed for each subscale was alternated to ensure that one puppet was not associated with a particular disposition, such as aggressiveness. The puppet that “spoke” first for each item was alternated across items. Items were presented in cycles in which one item from each of the subscales was presented in turn, beginning with the subscale of achievement. Items were presented in the same order for all children. Session 2 lasted approximately 15–20 minutes. Conversation codes Emotion. The entire content of the mother-child conversations was transcribed verbatim. Each conversation turn was transcribed on a different speaker

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tier. A conversation turn was defined as a complete thought unit bounded on either side by a 2–3-second silence and followed by either the same speaker or another speaker. For example, the two units, “Did you have fun that day? [pause] I did,” that a mother provided were transcribed on two separate speaker tiers. Therefore, several turns of conversation may have occurred in succession for the same speaker. The first and second authors checked the transcription for all of the conversations using this criterion. The coding scheme for emotional content was adapted from Fivush (1993, 1994). Stretches of emotion-related conversation were identified by marking the use of an emotion term and subsequent elaborations on that emotion term. Thus, this coding scheme was mutually exclusive and exhaustive in that each conversation turn was identified as referring to emotion or not. An emotion term was defined as a word that explicitly labeled a felt emotion (e.g., sad) or labeled behaviors associated with an emotional state (e.g., cried). Emotion words, in order of frequency of occurrence, included the following: fun, funny, like, feel, good, miss, scared, love, bad, sad, worry, surprise, upset, mad, angry, happy, excited, afraid, hate, sorry, nervous, brave, hurt, enjoy, proud, lonely. References to hurt in the context of physical pain and the use of intensifiers (e.g., “Wow!”) were not included. An initial reference to an emotion word was coded an initiation. Initiations occurred either in isolation or as the first reference to an emotion in a series of turns that elaborated further on that emotion. All words or phrases that served one of the following functions were coded as elaborations on the emotion: provided an explanation for the emotion, requested an explanation for the emotion, provided a resolution for the emotion, described how others responded to the emotion, confirmed or denied the emotion, or other. We thus defined emotionrelated conversation as initiations plus all subsequent elaborations on the emotion. After identifying emotion-related conversation, each conversation turn that was coded as emotion-related was coded for reference. This mutually exclusive and exhaustive coding scheme for reference included codes for child, other, and activity. The child code referred to an emotional experience of the child (Mother: “You had fun at that party”; Child: “That big dog scared me”). The other code referred to an emotional experience of a person other than the child (Child: “She liked the gift I gave her”). The activity code referred to an emotional connotation of an activity (Mother: “That birthday party was fun”). The co-occurrence of “child” and “other” references (e.g., “We had fun”) was resolved using a hierarchical rule in which the “child” code took precedence over the “other” code. Reliability coefficients for initiations, emotion-related conversation, and reference were calculated using Cohen’s kappa, as described in Bakeman and Gottman (1983). Reliability was calculated on 20% of the transcripts, which included 1,869 conversation turns. Reliability coefficients for initiations, emotion-related conversation, and reference were .88, .83, and .97, respectively. Table 1 shows descriptive statistics for the frequency of occurrence for emotion codes.

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Table 1. Descriptive Statistics for Emotion Codes, Mental State Codes, and Conversation Length

Emotion codes Child Activity Other Mother initiations Child initiations Mental state codes Total Child Mother Conversation turns Total Child Mother

M

(SD)

Range

13.22 5.50 2.44 7.84 2.03

(10.98) (5.44) (3.85) (6.58) (2.19)

0–45 0–18 0–16 0–24 0–8

4.25 1.66 2.59

(4.46) (1.84) (3.62)

0–22 0–8 0–14

178.81 70.37 108.44

(51.21) (21.30) (30.91)

104–286 41–133 47–191

Note: Statistics are reported in terms of the frequency of occurrence per conversation.

Mental State Terms The coding scheme for mental states was adapted from Bartsch and Wellman (1995). Coders identified mental state terms that referred to a mental process (other than emotion) that was used to refer to a person’s subjective evaluation concerning details of the event. Mental state terms, in order of frequency of occurrence, included the following: know, want, think, thought, need, sure, try, guess, remember, wish, wondered, believe, concentrate, interested, notice, doubt, remind, and idea. Examples of children’s uses of mental state terms are: “And Verna didn’t want to do it, right?” “Because I wanted to fight, but um, they didn’t see us fight,” “I thought they were gonna tear up my bed,” “And then I said, ‘I want Mommy,’” “I thought they were trying to get me.” Examples of mothers’ uses of mental state terms are: “You knew that Mommy always comes back, right?” “What did you think about the haunted house?” “You were really interested in watching him taking those stitches out, weren’t you?” “Why did you think that?” “You did put on skis and try to learn, didn’t you?” “You didn’t want Mommy to leave you there.” The use of a mental state term was not coded as a reference to a mental state if the person used the term to refer to something other than a person’s subjective experience about the event. For example, references that indicated that a person did or did not remember a detail (e.g., “I don’t know,” “I don’t remember,” “I think so,” or “Oh, I know what he gave to me”). Also, references to “know” were excluded if they were used as attention getters (e.g., “Know what?”). References to “think” were excluded if participants used the term to convey uncertainty about a detail, “I think you’re right,” or “I don’t think that happened,” or if used to encourage children to recall more about the event

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(e.g., “Think harder”). Reliability (Cohen’s kappa) for the identification of mental state terms was .91. Table 1 shows descriptive statistics for the total frequency of occurrence for mental state codes and frequency as a function of speaker.1 Dependent Variables Emotion. Four variables were obtained from the emotion content codes. First, the total frequency for emotion-related conversation was calculated by summing the number of conversation turns that were coded for emotion (initiations plus elaborations on the emotion). To correct for length of the conversations, the frequencies obtained for each dyad were divided by the number of conversation turns for that dyad, providing an index of the proportion of conversation turns that related to emotion. Second, a child/activity reference variable was obtained to isolate references that related most directly to emotional evaluations that concerned the child. This variable was calculated because, as mentioned previously, some evidence suggests that children become more engaged in conversations that focus on themselves rather than on others (Miller et al., 1990). For each dyad, child codes and activity codes were summed, excluding references to the emotions of others, and this frequency was divided by the number of conversation turns for the dyad. Two additional variables indexed the amount that children and mothers initiated talk about emotion. Initiations made by the mother (mother initiations) were summed and divided by the total number of conversation turns that the mother provided. Initiations made by the child (child initiations) were summed and divided by the total number of conversation turns that the child provided. Mental State Terms. A single variable was obtained from the mental state codes because references to mental states were infrequent. The proportion of conversation turns that referred to mental state terms was obtained by summing the mental state codes and dividing by the total number of conversation turns. Elaborations on mental state terms were not coded because only three elaborations on mental states occurred in the data set. Organization of Self-Knowledge. Eder (1990) reported that the CSVQ items yield 10 internally consistent dimensions (see Appendix A) and three larger factors (e.g., self-control), although the specific items that constituted each 1 To us, desire terms, such as “want” and “wish,” are mental attitudes that may have affective connotations, but they do not convey a direct and explicit emotional evaluation. Rather, the affective connotation exists primarily because the child feels one way or another about a specific object, situation, activity, or person, and thus she desires it or not. Our goal was to create a category of emotion reference that made a clear distinction between emotional evaluation and other mental states to test the hypothesis that explicit emotional evaluations of experience in conversation may be uniquely important for constructing representations of how one views the world, and thus for constructing knowledge about the psychological self. Thus, references to desire were combined with references to other mental states.

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factor varied somewhat at ages 3 1/2, 5 1/2, and 7 1/2. In the present research, the factor structure that Eder obtained for 5 1/2-year-olds was used (Appendix B). This factor structure was used instead of the factor structure Eder obtained for 3 1/2-year-olds because (a) the children in Eder’s (1990) sample were 44-months old, whereas 25 of the 32 children in this study were already between 49 and 57 months of age; (b) the factor structure for 5 1/2-year-olds incorporated more of the items from the questionnaire; and (c) preliminary data from 19 of the 32 participants, in which we examined only maternal references to emotion in relation to a self-knowledge score that was computed using a strategy similar to the one used in the present study, indicated very weak predictive utility for one of the factors that Eder (1990) obtained for 3 1/2-year-olds (see Farrar, Welch-Ross, Caldwell, & Haight, 1995). Organization of self-knowledge was defined as the consistency with which children chose the statements shown in Appendix B that are indicative of the three factors. What follows are hypothetical examples using the factor of SelfControl to illustrate how children’s responses were used to index organized selfknowledge. A child would show organized self-knowledge on the Self-Control factor if she selected “I don’t like to tease people,” instead of its opposite, “I like to tease people,” and then continued to select all of the other statements of a pair that were indicative of Self-Control (e.g., selected “When I get angry, I feel like being quiet,” instead of its opposite, “When I get angry, I feel like hitting someone,” etc.). Note also that this particular child would perceive herself as high on Self-Control. In addition, a child would show organized self-knowledge on the Self-Control factor if she did the reverse and selected “I like to tease people,” instead of its opposite, “I don’t like to tease people,” and proceeded to select all of the other statements of a pair that were not indicative of Self-Control (e.g., “When I get angry, I feel like hitting someone,” instead of its opposite, “When I get angry, I feel like being quiet,” etc.). Note also that this particular child would perceive herself as low on Self-Control. However, a child would not show organized self-knowledge if she selected half of the statements that were indicative of Self-Control (e.g., “I don’t like to tease people”) and also selected half of the statements that were not indicative of Self-Control (e.g., “When I get angry, I feel like hitting someone”). This child would not represent herself consistently as being any particular way with respect to the factor of Self-Control. Thus, whether children perceived themselves as being high or low on the factor (i.e., the particular content of the self-knowledge) did not matter for the organization scores. Rather, of interest was whether or not children showed an organized representation of their psychological qualities, regardless of what the particular qualities were. To obtain an index of organized self-knowledge, first an organization score was computed for each factor. The number of items that children endorsed on each factor was summed. If the sum for a factor was less than half of the items, it was reverse-scored (i.e., subtracted from the number of items on the factor); then, this score was divided by the number of items on that factor. The result was a

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score varying from .50 to 1.00, where .50 indicates chance performance (half of the items children chose were consistent with the factor, half not) and 1.00 indicates that all of the items children chose were consistent with the factor. The organization of self-knowledge score was an average calculated across factors. Linguistic Skill. Mean length of utterance in words (MLU), which is the ratio of morphemes to utterances, was calculated to index language ability (Brown, 1973; Pan, 1994). The mean MLUs for the 32 children who completed the CSVQ and for the 15 children who did not were 3.79 (median 5 3.60, SD 5 1.09), and 3.34 (median 5 3.41, SD 5 798), respectively, t(45) 5 1.54, p , .17. 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 often than boys do (Fivush, 1994). We therefore conducted preliminary analyses to determine if reference to emotions and mental states differed as a function of gender. An independent t-test showed that the proportion of emotionrelated conversation did not differ between mother-daughter and mother-son dyads, t(30) 5 .649, p , .521. An independent t-test showed that girls and boys provided an equal number of initiations, t(30) 5 .179, p , .859. Also, mother initiations did not differ as a function of the child’s gender, t(30) 5 .382, p , .705. In contrast to the results for talk about emotion, an independent t-test showed that the proportion of references to mental states was greater for mother-son dyads (M 5 .028, SD 5 .02) than for mother-daughter dyads (M 5 .015, SD 5 .014), t(30) 5 2.093, p , .045. An assumption of this research was that mothers, more often than their children, initiate and guide the content of mother-child reminiscing, including emoTable 2. Descriptive Statistics for Dependent Variables Obtained from Emotion Codes and Mental State Codes, and Organization of Self-Knowledge Scores Variable

M

SD

Range

Emotion references Emotion-related conversation Child/activity Mother initiation Child initiation Mental state references Organization of self-knowledge

.113 .100 .069 .027 .021 .678

.076 .069 .053 .028 .018 .082

0–.301 0–.265 0–.210 0–.096 0–.085 .528–.840

Note: Emotion references and mental state references are reported in terms of the mean proportion of conversation turns.

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tional content. These conversations provide a context within which children begin to construct self-knowledge from emotional evaluation. Thus, the expectation would be that (a) mothers initiate more talk about emotions than do their children, and (b) the amount that mothers and children initiate conversation about emotion should be related positively. Consistent with the first expectation, mothers provided 77.5% of the 324 initiations of talk about emotion. The mean proportion of conversation turns that were initiations of talk about emotion was greater for mothers than for children (see Table 2), t(30) 5 5.044, p , .0001. Moreover, examination of the frequency of initiations showed that 26 of the 32 mothers initiated talk about emotion more frequently than their children did. Difference scores (number of mother initiations minus number of child initiations) were computed for these 26 dyads. The mean of the difference scores was 7.30 (median 5 6, range 5 1–22). Each of the 4 children who initiated talk about emotion more than their mothers made only one initiation more than their mothers did. Two of the dyads did not mention emotion at all. Clearly, mothers initiated talk about emotion more frequently in this sample. Yet, consistent with the second expectation, mother initiations and child initiations were correlated positively, r(30) 5 .458, p , .008. A series of hierarchical multiple regressions was performed to test the hypothesis that reference to emotion and mental states predicts organized self-knowledge. Table 3 shows intercorrelations among the variables that were included in the regressions (i.e., organization of self-knowledge scores, MLU, the proportion of references to mental states, proportion of emotion-related conversation, and proportion of child/activity references to emotion). The first regression analysis was performed using emotion-related conversation as a predictor of self-organization scores. The second regression differed from the first in that child/activity references were the index of emotion talk, entered as a predictor, rather than emotion-related conversation. Most references to activity were references to how an activity should be evaluated by the child (“That was fun, wasn’t it?”). Therefore, the child/activity reference variable was used to index talk about emotion that related most directly to the emotional evalTable 3. Pearson Correlations Among Predictor Variables and Dependent Variables and Age MLU Organization of self-knowledge MLU Mental state references Child/activity references *p , .05. **p , .01. ***p , .0001.

.370*

Mental state references

Child/activity references

Emotion-related conversation

.201 .263

.388* .136 .467**

.093 .093 .505** .967***

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Table 4. Regression of Organization of Self-Knowledge Scores on MLU, Emotion Reference, and Mental State Reference Predictor Step 1 MLU Step 2 Child/activity Step 3 Mental state reference

Partial correlationa

bb

SE(b)c

R2

DR2

F of D

.370 (.370)

.025 (.027)

.013 (.013)

.00 (.00)

.137 (.137)

4.77* (4.77)*

.367 (.360)

.440 (.408)

.219 (.206)

.253 (.249)

.116 (.112)

4.50* (4.31)*

2.059 (2.080)

2.276 (2.368)

.845 (.872)

.256 (.254)

.003 (.005)

0.75 (.18)

Note: The results for the analysis that includes emotion-related conversation as the Step 3 predictor are in parentheses. aThese data show correlations between the variable entered and the dependent variable after partialing out the previous variable entered in the model. bBeta represents coefficients from final regression step. cSE(b) represents standard error of beta from final regression step. *p , .05.

uation that was made or should be made by the child. This second regression was thus performed to determine if a variable that excluded references to the emotions of others would account for more variance in organization of self-knowledge scores than a variable that included all references to emotion. This variable accounted for 90% of emotion-related conversation (i.e., 699 child and activity codes of 777 total emotion codes). For both regressions, MLU was the first predictor entered, followed by the index of emotion reference, and finally, the proportion of mental state references. The results of these regressions are presented in Table 4. Because the findings were similar between the two regressions, the results for emotion-related conversation are reported in parentheses. Reference to emotion accounted for a significant amount of variance in organized self-knowledge, after controlling for MLU. The overall model involving child/activity references was significant, adjusted R2 5 .176, F(3, 28) 5 3.207, p , .038, as was the model involving emotion-related conversation, adjusted R2 5 .174, F(3, 28) 5 3.172, p , .040.2 2 Three regressions were conducted, two of which included a gender x emotion reference interaction term (either emotion-related conversation or child/activity references), and a third that included a gender x mental state reference interaction term. The main effect of gender was significant, and a t-test confirmed that girls had higher organization of self-knowledge scores than boys, t(1, 33) 5 3.11, p , .004. Gender did not moderate the results reported here between organized self-knowledge and emotion/mental state references; however, these findings should be interpreted cautiously given that the sample size precludes drawing firm conclusions concerning the potential moderating effects of gender. A complete description of these analyses and the results may be obtained from the first author.

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Two additional regressions were performed to determine if reference to mental states predicted organized self-knowledge after controlling only for MLU and to determine if reference to emotion remained a significant predictor after controlling for both MLU and reference to mental states. Again, MLU was the first predictor entered. These two analyses thus differed from the first set of regressions in that reference to mental states was entered second and the index of emotion reference (either emotion-related conversation or child/activity reference) was entered last. The results showed that reference to mental states did not predict organized self-knowledge after controlling for MLU, accounting for 1.2% of the variance, pr 5 .116, F(1 , 28) 5 .395, p , .53. Emotion-related conversation predicted 11.7% of the variance, pr 5 .351, F(1, 28) 5 3.93, p , .057, and child/ activity references accounted for 10.7% of the variance, pr 5 .355, F(1, 28) 5 4.025, p , .055, after controlling for both MLU and reference to mental states. Because the relation between emotion references and organized self-knowledge could be limited to one CSVQ factor or to one gender, Pearson correlations were performed using child/activity references to emotion and self-knowledge scores to determine if the relation held consistently across the three CSVQ factors. The child/activity variable was used for these analyses because it accounted for slightly more variability in organized self-knowledge. As shown in Table 5, child/activity emotion references were related positively to organization of selfknowledge scores for the factors of Self-Acceptance via Achievement and SelfControl, but were related only weakly to organization of self-knowledge for the Self-Acceptance via Affiliation factor. Examination of these correlations as a function of gender showed a consistent pattern of moderate, positive correlations between child/activity references and self-knowledge organization scores for all CSVQ factors with a single exception—a weaker correlation for boys between child/activity references and organization of self-knowledge scores on the Self-Acceptance via Affiliation factor. Thus, the relation between reference to emotion and organized self-knowledge was not limited exclusively to a particular CSVQ factor or gender.

Table 5. Correlations Between Child/Activity References to Emotion and Organization of Self-Knowledge Scores for Each CSVQ Factor

Total sample (n 5 32) Girls (n 5 17) Boys (n 5 15) *p , .05.

Self-acceptance via affiliation

Self-acceptance via achievement

Self-control

.170 .400 .054

.362* .412 .401

.331* .325 .473

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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 their children did provides additional support for this socialization interpretation of the findings. However, these correlational data obtained from a single time point only suggest that mother-child talk about emotion may influence the development of self-knowledge, and that mothers initiate and guide this process. Longitudinal data are needed to clarify whether or not the development of organized knowledge about the self is indeed an outcome of discussing emotional aspects of past experience. One alternative is that children who have begun to develop organized knowledge about the self may be better contributors to conversation about emotion because they are beginning to become aware of their typical subjective orientation toward particular situations. Moreover, as children develop an awareness of the psychological self, they may begin to initiate and guide conversation about emotion, which mothers then follow. However, the pattern of data argues against this latter interpretation; that is, during the preschool years, the frequency with which children discuss emotion, and the types of emotions children discuss, change over time to become more similar to the way their mothers talk about emotion rather than the reverse (Dunn et al., 1987; Fivush, 1993; Fivush & Kuebli, 1997). In future research, more lengthy observations of conversation will be needed to examine emotion references for mothers and children separately to determine how these contributions change in relation to one another over time and how each relates to changes in organized self-knowledge. Another possible explanation for the findings is that the relation between talk about emotion and organized self-knowledge is a function of a third variable, such as individual differences in children’s social cognitive skill, which includes reasoning about the mental representations of oneself and others. For example, research is needed to determine if skills related to social metacognition provide children with the cognitive tools both for building organized knowledge about the self and for engaging in conversations about emotion. The data presented here confirmed the hypothesis that emotional evaluation predicts children’s self-knowledge, accounting for 11% of the variance after controlling for language ability. Clearly, most of the variability in self-knowledge scores is still to be explained. Future research may show that the frequency of evaluative references other than emotion, such as explicit social comparison (e.g., Miller et al., 1992), explains additional unique variability in the organization of self-knowledge. These references also mark which experiences are important to remember and signify how events should be interpreted and related to the

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self. Contrary to expectation, discussion of mental states did not predict organized self-knowledge in this study. One possibility is that mothers and children referred to mental states infrequently, thereby constraining our ability to detect reliable covariation between organized self-knowledge and talk about mental states. Perhaps, as children grow older and engage in more frequent discussion about these aspects of subjective experience, talk about mental states may predict organized self-knowledge. Alternatively, it is worth considering that the infrequent occurrence of mental state terms is a real phenomenon that has real meaning for the social construction of self-knowledge. That is, those aspects of experience that are more frequent might be expected to play a greater role in development. The dyads in this study simply focused on exploring emotions more than other mental states. Additional research is needed to determine if parents and children refer to emotions more than to mental states when talking about past events. In this case, reference to emotion may play the greater role in establishing a child’s self-view. The meaning that the infrequent occurrence of mental state talk in this sample has for explaining the development of self-knowledge is area for future research. Another consideration is that talk about desires (e.g., references to “want” and “wish”) and talk about needs were combined with references to other mental states, such as thinking, knowing, and believing. References to mental states occurred too infrequently in this sample to conduct a more fine-grained analysis of the relation between different types of mental state terms and organized self-knowledge. This lack of differentiation in categorizing mental states may have obscured a relation between specific types of mental state references and CSVQ scores. Therefore, additional research is needed to determine if particular kinds of references to mental states predict organized self-knowledge more than others do. The goal of this study was to measure the organization of children’s selfknowledge, regardless of the particular disposition children described (e.g., whether they perceived themselves as high on Self-Control or low on Self-Control). One implication of this approach was not tested in this research. That is, the expectation would be that children who chose items in a consistent manner on the CSVQ, regardless of whether these children chose most of the items or very few of the items of a factor, should refer to emotion more often than children who chose an intermediate number of items. However, all children endorsed at least half of the items on the Self-Acceptance via Affiliation and Self-Acceptance via Achievement factors. Therefore, most children indicated that they perceived themselves as being high on these dimensions. Importantly, by definition, the children who chose most of the items on these factors demonstrated organized knowledge of self. However, because most children endorsed most of the items on these two factors, high organization of self-knowledge scores were contributed to primarily by children who perceived themselves as highly affiliative or high achieving. Thus, one qualification of the results could be that the index of self-knowledge has more to do with measuring the dispositions of children than

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with measuring the degree of organized knowledge these children had about themselves. Data involving talk about emotion and self-knowledge scores for the factor of Self-Control support the claim that the index captures organization of selfknowledge rather than a personality dimension. Children who had high organization scores, meaning those children who endorsed very few statements that were indicative of Self-Control (i.e., 4 children who chose 1, 2, or 3 of the 14 items on the Self-Control factor) and children who chose most of the statements that were indicative of Self-Control (i.e., 4 children who chose 12, 13, or 14 of the items on the Self-Control factor) had higher means for the proportion of child/activity emotion references (Ms 5 .174 and .132, respectively) than did children who chose statements inconsistently (i.e., 4 children who chose 7 of the 14 items on the Self-Control factor, M 5 .056). The numbers of children in each of these categories was too small to conduct statistical analyses. However, the pattern of means shows clearly that dyads involving children who endorsed most of the statements on the Self-Control factor and dyads involving children who endorsed very few of the statements on the Self-Control factor engaged in more talk about emotion than did dyads involving children who chose statements inconsistently (i.e., endorsed exactly half of the statements that were indicative of Self-Control). This evidence is consistent with the findings that would be expected if the self-knowledge score measures organization of self-understanding, regardless of the child’s particular disposition, and thus is inconsistent with a disposition interpretation. Implications for the Development of Autobiographical Recall The results of this study point to directions for future research that could lead to a better understanding of the relation between the development of self-knowledge and autobiographical memory. Autobiographical recall emerges between the ages of 3 and 8, and consists of memories for events that individuals recognize as linked to their own pasts (Nelson, 1993). Together, these memories tell the story of the self (Fivush, 1988; Nelson, 1993). Note that the present results involving 4-year-olds are consistent with the findings of research in which 8-yearolds’ responses to the subscales of the CSVQ were examined in relation to the emotional content of their autobiographical narratives (Fivush & Buckner, 1996). In that research, children provided narratives in response to prompts that were based on the content of the CSVQ subscales. Similar to the procedure used in the present study, children were classified as being either schematic or unschematic on the dimensions of the CSVQ as a function of whether they scored consistently high (schematic) or consistently low (unschematic) on each of the subscales. The findings showed that children referred to emotions in narratives that corresponded to CSVQ subscales for which they were schematic more often than they referred to emotions in narratives that corresponded to CSVQ subscales for which they were unschematic. Thus, the degree to which children elaborated on

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the emotional aspects of past experience in their independent, personal narratives was related to the organization of their psychological self-concepts. These data complement the present results, and together, the findings provide a basis for speculating about the processes involved in the social construction of personal, autobiographical narratives. For example, one possibility is that the references that mothers and children make to emotional experience when discussing events from early childhood are part of a larger social construction of meaning through which children begin to organize and represent events in personalized forms that facilitate the development of enduring memories. As self-knowledge becomes increasingly organized, children may begin to interpret the meaning of events with respect to a new dimension of experience, namely personal relevance, which includes an evaluative, subjective perspective. Longitudinal research is needed to determine if perhaps the age at which children begin to develop organized selfknowledge predicts when children begin to establish autobiographical memories. Organized self-knowledge, as well as the relation between discussion of emotion and self-knowledge, may emerge earlier for some children than for others. These children might then interpret and represent events in relation to the self earlier in development, and as they grow older, recall events from earlier in childhood. REFERENCES Adams, S., Kuebli, J., Boyle, P., & Fivush, R. (1995). Gender differences in parent-child conversations about past emotions: A longitudinal investigation. Sex Roles, 33, 309–323. Bakeman, R., & Gottman, J. M. (1983). Observing interaction: An introduction to sequential analysis. New York: Cambridge University Press. Bartsch, K., & Wellman, H. M. (1995). Children talk about the mind. New York: Oxford University Press. Beeghley, M., Bretherton, I., & Mervis, C. (1986). Mothers’ internal state language to toddlers. British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 4, 247–269. Bretherton, I., Fritz, J., Zahn-Waxler, C., & Ridgeway, D. (1986). Learning to talk about emotions: A functionalist perspective. Child Development, 57, 529–548. Brown, R. (1973). A first language: The early stages. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Bruner, J. (1987). The transactional self. In J. Bruner & H. Haste (Eds.), Making sense: The child’s construction of the world (pp. 81–96). London: Methuen. Damon, W., & Hart, D. (1988). Self-understanding in childhood and adolescence. New York: Cambridge University Press. Dunn, J., Bretherton, I., & Munn, P. (1987). Conversations about feeling states between mothers and their young children. Developmental Psychology, 23, 132–139. Dunn, J., Brown, J., & Beardsall, L. (1991). Family talk about feeling states and children’s later understanding of others’ emotions. Developmental Psychology, 27, 448–455. Dunn, J., Brown, J., Slomkowski, C., Tesla, C., & Youngblade, L. (1991). Young children’s understanding of other people’s feelings and beliefs: Individual differences and their antecedents. Child Development, 62, 1352–1366. Eder, R. A. (1989). The emergent personologist: The structure and content of 3 1/2-, 5 1/2-,

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and 7 1/2-year-olds’ concepts of themselves and other persons. Child Development, 60, 1218–1228. Eder, R. A. (1990). Uncovering young children’s psychological selves: Individual and developmental differences. Child Development, 61, 849–863. Farrar, M. J., Welch-Ross, M. K., Caldwell, L., & Haight, S. (1995). Attachment, self-concept, and autobiographical memory development. Poster session presented at the meetings of the Society for Research in Child Development, Indianapolis, IN. Fivush, R. (1988). The functions of event memory: Some comments on Nelson and Barsalou. In E. Winograd & U. Neisser (Eds.), Remembering reconsidered: Ecological and traditional approaches to the study of memory (pp. 277–282). New York: Cambridge University Press. Fivush, R. (1993). Emotional content of parent-child conversations about the past. In C. A. Nelson (Ed.), The Minnesota Symposia on Child Psychology, Vol. 26: Memory and affect in development (pp. 39–78). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum. Fivush, R. (1994). Constructing narrative, emotion, and self in parent-child conversation about the past. In U. Neisser & R. Fivush (Eds.), The remembering self: Construction and accuracy in the self-narrative (pp. 136–157). New York: Cambridge University Press. Fivush, R., & Buckner, J. (1996). Organization of autobiographical memory. Paper presented in J. R. Sehulster & D. Bruce (Chairs), Symposium conducted at the International Conference on Memory, Abano Terme, Padova, Italy. Fivush, R. & Kuebli, J. (1997). Making everyday events emotional: The construal of emotion in parent-child conversations about the past. In N. L. Stein, P. A. Ornstein, B. Tversky, & C. J. Brainerd (Eds.), Memory for everyday and emotional events (pp. 239–266). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum. Furrow, D., Moore, C., Davidge, J., & Chiasson, L. (1992). Mental terms in mothers’ and children’s speech: Similarities and relationships. Journal of Child Language, 19, 617–631. Kuebli, J., Butler, S., & Fivush, R. (1995). Mother-child talk about past emotions: Relations of maternal language and child gender over time. Cognition & Emotion, 9, 265–284. Kuebli, J., & Fivush, R. (1992). Gender differences in parent-child conversations about past emotions. Sex Roles, 27, 683–698. Mead, G. H. (1934). Mind, self and society. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Miller, P. J. (1994). Narrative practices: Their role in socialization and self-construction. In U. Neisser & R. Fivush (Eds.), The remembering self: Construction and accuracy in the life narrative (pp. 158–179). New York: Cambridge University Press. Miller, P. J., Mintz, J., Hoogstra, L., Fung, H., & Potts, R. (1992). The narrated self: Young children’s construction of self in relation to others in conversational stories of personal experience. Merrill-Palmer Quarterly, 38, 45–67. Miller, P. J., Potts, R., Fung, H., Hoogstra, L., & Mintz, J. (1990). Narrative practices and the social construction of self in childhood. American Ethnologist, 17, 292–311. Moore, C., Furrow, D., Chiasson, L., & Patriquin, M. (1994). Developmental relationships between production and comprehension of mental terms. First Language, 14, 1–17. Nelson, K. (1993). Developing self-knowledge from autobiographical memory. In T. K. Srull & R. S. Wyer (Eds.), The mental representation of trait and autobiographical knowledge about the self: Advances in social cognition (Vol. 5, pp. 111–122). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

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Nelson, K. (1996). Language in cognitive development: The emergence of the mediated mind. New York: Cambridge University Press. Pan, B. A. (1994). Basic measures of child language. In J. L. Sokolov & C. E. Snow (Eds.), Handbook of research in language development using CHILDES (pp. 26– 49). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum. Radke-Yarrow, M., Belmont, B., Nottelmann, E., & Bottomly, L. (1988). The emergence

APPENDIX A Sample Items that Comprise Subscales of the Children’s Self-View Questionnaire Subscale Achievement

Aggression

Alienation

Harm Avoidance

Social Anxiety

Social Closeness

Social Potency

Stress Reaction Traditionalism

Well-Being

Items I care about doing a really good job on everything I do. / I don’t care about doing a really good job on everything that I do. I like hard work. / I don’t like hard work. When I get angry, I feel like being quiet. / When I get angry, I feel like hitting someone. I don’t ever try to push in front of people in line. / I sometimes try to push in front of people in line. When my friends come over to my house, they come to play with my toys and not with me. / When my friends come over to my house, they come to play with me and not my toys. People don’t usually say mean things to me. / People always say mean things to me. I don’t climb up on things that are high. / I climb really high things. When I hear lightning and thunder, I would never look out the window. / When I hear lightning and thunder, I look out the window. When new people come to my house, I show them my toys. / When new people come to my house, I run to Mom and Dad. I would never play with a group of kids I didn’t know. / I would play with a group of kids I didn’t know. I like to play with friends. / I like to play by myself. When I’m sad, I go find someone to play with. / When I’m sad, I go play in my room by myself. I like to tell my friends what to do. / I like to do what my friends tell me to do. I like to show things at “Show and Tell” at school. / I don’t like to show things at “Show and Tell” at school. I get mad a little. / I get mad a lot. I cry when I get upset. / I don’t cry when I get upset. I never do things that I am not supposed to do. / I sometimes do things that I am not supposed to do. I am a good girl (boy). / I am not a good girl (boy). I always feel great when I wake up in the morning. / I usually don’t feel that great when I wake up in the morning. I am usually happy. / I am usually not happy.

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of the self in atypical populations. In D. Cicchetti and M. Beeghly (Eds.), The self in transition (pp. 345–361). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Sperry, L. L., & Smiley, P. A. (Eds.). (1995). Exploring young children’s concepts of self and other through conversation, Vol. 69: New directions for child development. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Wellman, H. M., Harris, P. L., Banerjee, M., & Sinclair, A. (1995). Early understanding of emotion: Evidence from natural language. Cognition & Emotion, 9, 117–150.

APPENDIX B Items Comprising Factors of the Children’s Self-View Questionnaire Factor Self-Control

Self-Acceptance via Achievement

Self-Acceptance via Affiliation

Items When I get angry, I feel like being quiet. I don’t climb up on things that are high. I don’t ever try to push in front of people in line. I don’t like to tease people. It’s not fun to scare people. I don’t think it would be fun at all to go down a slide headfirst. I get mad a little. I don’t usually care when other kids do things better than me. When my friends come over to my house, they play with my toys and not with me. I don’t think it would be fun at all to hang upside-down on a jungle-gym. I never get in trouble for being bad. When I hear lightning and thunder, I would never look out the window. I never do naughty things. I don’t like to watch people fight. I don’t ever feel that people want bad things to happen to me. I like to tell my friends what to do. I never do things that I am not supposed to do. I like hard work. I’m the leader in “Follow the Leader.” I care about doing a really good job on everything that I do. I really like myself. I pick the game to play. I like to have people look at me. I hardly ever get grouchy. I like to show things at “Show and Tell” at school. I usually do what Mommy or the teacher says. When I’m sad, I go find someone to play with. People want to be around me. It’s more fun to do things with other people than by myself. I am a good girl/boy. I like to play with friends. I have a best friend. I am happiest when I’m around people. I always feel great when I wake up in the morning. People don’t usually say mean things to me. When I’m sad, I go find someone to play with. It’s hard for me to get upset.