John C. Masters

Children's consensual knowledge about the experiential determinants of emotion.

Kindergarten, third-, and sixth-grade children were given vignettes describing experiences that were likely to produce emotional states, and their consensus about the probable affective reaction was determined. A sample of eight social and personal (private) experiences was utilized in the vignettes: success, failure, dishonesty (caught or not caught), experiencing nurturance or aggression, and experiencing justified or unjustified punishment. The potential affective reactions that children were asked to choose among included happiness, sadness, anger, fear, and neutral affect. There were no sex differences. Children of all ages agreed that relatively simple experiences such as success and nurturance would elicit a happy reaction. For other categories of experience, multiple consensuses appeared for more than one affective reaction. There were developmental differences in the affective reactions anticipated to five of the eight experience categories. Results are discussed in terms of cognitive and social learning determinants of knowledge about the experimental antecedents of emotion for oneself and others.

Children's strategies for controlling affective responses to aversive social experience

It was hypothesized that one mechanism of self-control that children develop is the strategic capacity to select the experiences they encounter. This hypothesis led to the prediction that children would deal with certain aversive social experiences by seeking out or taking advantage of opportunities for nurturant experiences. Young children were exposed to an aversive social experience in which they received less nurturance than a peer, a positive experience in which they received more nurturance, or a neutral experience in which nurturance was equal. Subsequently, an opportunity was provided for children to control the length of time they watched a highly nurturant television program. As predicted, boys experiencing an aversive social encounter increased the length of time they exposed themselves to the nurturant television show, and their level of reduced positive affect was related to how long they watched the nurturant content, further supporting the interpretation that they did so in response to their own affective state. Girls did not adopt the strategy of self-exposure to nurturant television but did appear to engage in self-distraction during the aversive social experience. Despite the apparent use of control strategies, there was no indication that these strategies were effective for the amelioration of reduced positive affect resulting from the aversive social experience. Discussion focuses on the sex differences observed in the adoption of strategic behavior and factors contributing to the ineffectiveness of the control strategies. A general model is proposed for personal and environmental factors requisite for the selection, employment, and effectiveness of strategies to control experiences and their affective consequences.

Consensual and Discriminative Stereotypy of Sex-Type Judgments by Parents and Children

MASTERS, JOHN C., and WILKINSON, ALEXANDER. Consensual and Discriminative Stereotypy of Sex-Type Judgments by Parents and Children. CHILD DEVELOPMENT, 1976, 47, 208-217. 4-yearold children, 7and 8-year-old children, and adults (parents) rated the sex-appropriateness of 52 toys. Age-related differences were found in 2 dimensions of stereotypy: consensual (normative agreement) and discriminative (ability to differentiate degrees of stereotypy). While the older children were in nearly perfect agreement with the adults on both dimensions, the younger children (a) agreed less well with the older subjects regarding consensual stereotypes, and (b) showed poorer discriminative awareness of other-sex than of own-sex stereotypes. Parents tended to bias their sex-appropriateness ratings in the direction of their own childrens sex unless they had children of both sexes. These results are discussed in terms of social learning factors (acquisition) and cognitive processes (retrieval) governing judgments of stereotypy.

Children's emotions and memory for affective narrative content

The present study was an investigation of effects of emotional states on childrens learning and memory for a short narrative. Happy, sad, or neutral moods were induced in 72 second-grade boys and girls by a standard affect induction procedure. This mood induction was accomplished either before or after they heard a story in which two protagonists encountered a variety of experiences having an affective character. For half of the subjects, the initial story event had a positive affective valence, and for half it was negative. Childrens memory for events in the narrative was assessed immediately afterward, using measures offo free recall, cued recall, and recognition. Children recalled more affective content than neutral content, and boys recalled more than girls. Valence of the initial story item and sex of subject influenced the relationship between mood state and memory for story events. Under some conditions, positive moods reduced recognition accuracy for positive material. The findings suggest that simple patterns of mood-influenced memory found in previous studies are modified by factors such as characteristics of the learner and the organization of the material to be learned. The relationship between mood and memory thus appears to be more complex than previously recognized.

Experimental Studies of Affective States in Children

In preparing this chapter, we set for ourselves a task with great diversity and not a great deal of unity within that diversity to provide a common thread. Nevertheless, we are convinced that this is an appropriate time to summarize the experimental literature on affective states in children, their antecedents, and their behavioral consequences. This is an area of research that stemmed not from clinical psychology but rather from personality and social psychology (if you care to draw a sharp distinction). It is an area that has little, if any, clinical or applicational work, at least any which involves children. It is an area that is quite young, with less than a decade of research effort to be summarized. But outweighing all the limitations, we feel, is the fact that experimental research is now being conducted on a topic long relegated only to clinical study and theoretical speculation: emotions, their cognitive and experiential antecedents, and their cognitive and behavioral consequences. Though the clinical procedures that may come from this research are still to be fully derived and tested, they can be readily anticipated once the growing body of experimental work has been reviewed. We will do some speculating; it is hoped that readers will do more and that derivative clinical practices will begin to be identified and evaluated.

Children's affective, behavioral, and cognitive responses to social comparison

Abstract Relative outcomes in social commerce with peers are potent determinants of cognitions and behavior in young children. Although there has been considerable attention given to the behavioral consequences of social comparisons following the receipt of rewards, there has been less concern with cognitive or affective consequences. Additionally, little is known about the accrued effects of multiple social comparison experiences that may be consistent or inconsistent with one another. In the present study, young children received a constant level of reward but the amount they saw a peer receive was varied. There were two sequences of reward distribution, and in a given sequence children received either the same number of rewards as the peer (=), more (+), or fewer (−). In a 3 × 3 factorial design all possible combinations occurred. A negative inequality in reward distribution, no matter where it fell in a sequence, made children sad and inclined children to distribute fewer rewards to peers. When a sequence contained an initial experience of positive inequality, children decreased subsequent levels of self-reward. Experiencing a comparison that revealed a negative inequality in reward distribution also disrupted childrens accuracy in appraising the overall distribution of rewards: even when an initial negative inequality was completely offset by an equivalent experience of positive inequality, children inaccurately concluded that they had received fewer rewards than their peers.

Social Reinforcement and Self-Gratification: Effects of Absolute and Socially Compared Levels of Nurturance

Abstract Social Reinforcement and Self-Gratification: Effects of Absolute and Socially Compared Levels of Nurturance