| Belief about the stability of traits refers to the understanding about whether traits are fixed or malleable, comes from one's social learning and self-experiences. This belief can be used to help people to analyze one self's or other people's behaviors or minds, and deduce their future behaviors, organize or control one self's reactions. This can be regarded as one of the reasons to explain people's different behaviors. Under the influence of the researches on theory of mind, this research is to investigate the development of 3-9 years old children's understanding about the stability of traits and the relations with their personality traits. Eight short constructed stories in study 1,showed with a set of drawings or on the paper, were used to test 40 children(4-5 years old) from the kinder garden, 40 students(7-8 years old)from elementary school and 40 undergraduate students(20-22 years old)from a normal university as an adult group. The statistic results showed that in predictions on negative traits, all age groups had significant age difference, which didn't exist in reasoning on positive traits. Young children were optimistic compared with the adult group, which is helpful to their developments and the explanations to children's depression or helpless in adolescence. 281 young children (3-9 years old) were tested to further the research with the improved stories. The results verified study 1's conclusions, and also found young children can put trait information into the process about the stability, but which is not stable. The relations between the understanding and personality traits were also studied to show the importance of cognitive factors in the personality system. The results found children at 3-4 years old which had different beliefs about the stability of traits had no significant differences on some traits, but did in children at 5-9 years old. Some ideas about the stability of traits are related to some personality traits through the control of one's goals and concerns. |
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