Pecora Giulia, Addessi Elsa, Schino Gabriele, Bellagamba Francesca
Dipartimento di Psicologia dei Processi di Sviluppo e Socializzazione, Facoltà di Medicina e Psicologia, Sapienza Università di Roma, 00185 Rome, Italy.
Istituto di Scienze e Tecnologie della Cognizione, Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche, 00185 Rome, Italy.
J Exp Child Psychol. 2014 Oct;126:80-90. doi: 10.1016/j.jecp.2014.03.008. Epub 2014 Jun 2.
Displacement activities are commonly recognized as behavioral patterns, mostly including self-directed actions (e.g., scratching, self-touching), that often occur in situations involving conflicting motivational tendencies. In ethology, several researchers have suggested that displacement activities could facilitate individuals in dealing with the stress experienced in a frustrating context. In child developmental research, some authors have assessed whether distraction strategies could help children to inhibit a dominant response during delay of gratification tasks. However, little is known about the displacement activities that young children may produce in such situations. This study was aimed at investigating whether displacement activities had an effect on preschool children's ability to postpone an immediate gratification (i.e., interacting with an attractive toy, a musical box), thereby functioning as regulators of their emotional state. To this end, we administered 143 2- to 4-year-olds with a delay maintenance task and related their performance with displacement activities they produced during the task and with actions with an external object. Children's latency to touch the musical box was positively related to their rate of displacement activities. However, the rate of displacement activities increased progressively as long as the children were able to inhibit the interaction with the musical box. In addition, the rate of displacement activities during the first 1 min of test did not predict the ability of children to inhibit the interaction with the box. These results suggest that displacement activities represented a functionless by-product of motivational conflict rather than a strategy that children used to inhibit their response to an attractive stimulus.
替代活动通常被认为是行为模式，主要包括自我指向的行为（如抓挠、自我触摸），这些行为经常出现在涉及相互冲突的动机倾向的情境中。在动物行为学中，一些研究人员认为替代活动可以帮助个体应对在令人沮丧的情境中所经历的压力。在儿童发展研究中，一些作者评估了分心策略是否可以帮助儿童在延迟满足任务中抑制主导反应。然而，对于幼儿在这种情境下可能产生的替代活动知之甚少。本研究旨在调查替代活动是否对学龄前儿童推迟即时满足（即与一个有吸引力的玩具——音乐盒互动）的能力有影响，从而作为他们情绪状态的调节因素。为此，我们对143名2至4岁的儿童进行了延迟维持任务，并将他们的表现与他们在任务期间产生的替代活动以及与外部物体的行为联系起来。儿童触摸音乐盒的潜伏期与他们的替代活动频率呈正相关。然而，只要儿童能够抑制与音乐盒的互动，替代活动的频率就会逐渐增加。此外，测试前1分钟内的替代活动频率并不能预测儿童抑制与盒子互动的能力。这些结果表明，替代活动代表了动机冲突的无功能副产品，而不是儿童用来抑制对有吸引力刺激的反应的一种策略。
