Department of Psychology and Neuroscience, Temple University, Philadelphia, PA 19122, USA.
Department of Psychology and Neuroscience, Temple University, Philadelphia, PA 19122, USA.
J Exp Child Psychol. 2024 Nov;247:106032. doi: 10.1016/j.jecp.2024.106032. Epub 2024 Aug 6.
Praise is thought to affect children's responses to failure, yet other potentially impactful messages about effort have been rarely studied. We experimentally investigated the effects of praise and "easy" feedback after success on children's persistence and self-evaluations after failure. Children (N = 150; M = 7.97 years, SD = 0.58) from the mid-Atlantic region of the United States (73 girls; 79% White) heard one of five types of feedback from an experimenter after success on online tangram puzzles: process praise ("You must have worked hard on that puzzle"), person praise ("You must be good at puzzles"), process-easy feedback ("It must have been easy to rotate and fit those pieces together"), person-easy feedback ("It must have been an easy puzzle for you"), or a control. Next, children failed to complete a harder tangram puzzle. Preregistered primary analyses revealed no differences in persistence and self-evaluation between person and process praise or between person-easy and process-easy feedback. Exploratory analyses showed that hearing process praise led to greater persistence after failure than the control condition (d = .61) and that process-easy feedback led to greater strategy generation than the control condition. The effects of adult feedback after success may be more context dependent than previously thought.
表扬被认为会影响孩子对失败的反应，但关于努力的其他潜在影响信息却很少被研究。我们通过实验研究了成功后表扬和“简单”反馈对孩子在失败后的坚持和自我评价的影响。来自美国中大西洋地区的 150 名儿童（N=150；M=7.97 岁，SD=0.58）在完成在线七巧板拼图任务后，从实验者那里听到了五种反馈类型之一：过程表扬（“你在那个拼图上一定很努力”）、个人表扬（“你一定很擅长拼图”）、过程简单反馈（“将这些碎片旋转并组合在一起一定很容易”）、个人简单反馈（“这个拼图对你来说一定很简单”）或控制条件。接下来，孩子们未能完成更难的七巧板拼图。预先注册的主要分析显示，个人表扬和过程表扬之间，或者个人简单反馈和过程简单反馈之间，在坚持和自我评价方面没有差异。探索性分析表明，听到过程表扬后，孩子在失败后的坚持程度比控制条件高（d=0.61），而过程简单反馈比控制条件更能促进策略的产生。成人在成功后的反馈效果可能比之前认为的更依赖于具体情境。
