The emergent personologist: the structure and content of 3 1/2-, 5 1/2-, and 7 1/2-year-olds' concepts of themselves and other persons.

Abstract

This study was based on the premise that personological conceptions are based in memory; hence age-related changes observed in memory should also be found for children's concepts of persons. Of particular interest was the general and specific temporal structure of children's concepts. 72 3 1/2-, 5 1/2-, and 7 1/2-year-old children were asked general and specific questions about the behaviors and internal states of themselves, their best friends, and an acquaintance. General questions were about typical and/or frequent events and were not located in a particular point in time (e.g., "What have you usually done in school?"); specific questions were temporally located (e.g., "What did you do in school today?"). Behavior questions concerned activities and involved action verbs; trait questions concerned internal states and involved adjectives. Responses were coded into the same 4 mutually exclusive categories of General Behavior, General Trait, Specific Behavior, Specific Trait as the question categories. The proportion of specific responses about persons increased reliably from 3 1/2 to 5 1/2 years, whereas the proportion of general responses was high and did not differ across the age groups. Furthermore, the proportion of trait, but not behavior, descriptions provided increased between 3 1/2 and 7 1/2 years. The results indicate that even young children have concepts of themselves and other persons that are not restricted to specific points in time and thus may form the basis for later dispositional conceptions.