Preschool-aged children recognize ambivalence: emerging identification of concurrent conflicting desires

Abstract

We examined the ability of preschool-aged children to identify conflicting, or ambivalent, desire states (e.g., “I want to go to the birthday party because there will be cake, but I also don’t want to go because I’m having fun playing at home”). Participants were 4- and 5-year-old children, and a group of undergraduate students (n = 20 in each age group). They were presented with 14 scenarios involving both “single desire” and “dual desire” states, including both approach (i.e., “want”) and avoidance (i.e., “not want”) desires. Our primary interest was children’s ability to identify concurrent conflicting “dual desire” states, and this ability was found in most of the 5-year-old age group tested and in about half of the 4-year-old age group. As such, these results provide evidence that children can identify ambivalence at earlier ages than previously reported. In addition, results showed that the challenge in recognizing ambivalence is the presence of desires of opposite valence directed at the same target.

Varieties of value: Children differentiate caring from liking

“…If children view liking as distinct from caring, then they might understand conflicts between these forms of regard, such as the conflict between your valuations of the two jackets. Such findings would extend our knowledge of children's understanding of inner conflicts, an area with mixed findings (for a review see Starmans, 2017): Some studies report that children do not understand conflicts between an individual's preferences (or between their preferences and goals) until around age 7 (e.g., Choe et al, 2005;Yang & Frye, 2017), while other studies suggest children grasp these conflicts at age 4 or 5 (e.g., Rostad & Pexman, 2015;Starmans & Bloom, 2016).…”

Universals and cultural diversity in the expression of gratitude

“…Other methods like self-report questionnaires often do not reliably reflect actual behaviour [ 28 , 29 ], and the few studies based on naturally occurring interaction have tended to focus on just one language (typically English) usually in a specific setting (e.g. the library), leaving questions about the generalizability and cross-cultural validity of the findings [ 30 , 31 ]. To be able to study gratitude in a wider range of settings, and to do so across a diverse set of cultures, we need audiovisual recordings of naturally occurring informal social interaction from around the world.…”