Children's use of personality attributions to predict other people's emotional and behavioral reactions.

This study examines children's abilities to take other people's personality traits into account when predicting their future emotional and behavioral reactions to events. Kindergarten, second-grade, fourth-grade, and college students listened to a series of stories. Each story described 3 examples of a child's past behavior from which a personality trait could be inferred. Subjects were asked to predict and explain the story character's behavioral or emotional reaction to a new event. Their responses were compared to those of subjects who were not given any information about the protagonist's past behavior, and to those of subjects who received prompts. There was an increase with age in the use of personality attributions to predict and explain future reactions. Subjects were more influenced by the trait information when predicting behavior than when predicting emotion. Understanding emotion may be more difficult in that it requires a conceptualization of personality traits as implying thoughts and feelings, as well as behavioral dispositions.