The Development Process And Stage Characteristics Of Children's Spontaneous Trait Inference

Spontaneous trait inference refers to the process of inferring personality traits based on the behavioral information without consciousness or specific purpose.A large number of studies have found that spontaneous trait inference has cross-cultural specificities.This study explored the development stages and characteristics of spontaneous trait inference of Chinese pupils from Grade 3 to Grade 6 with their age growth.Comparing to previous research,this study used a lexical judgment task proposed by Na et al.(2011)which was more ecological and sensitive to the spontaneous trait inference.The previous research argued that there should be a significant interaction between language and theory of mind(ToM),while spontaneous trait inference was the expression of the ToM.Therefore,this study also inspected the influence of the language proficiencies of Chinese pupils on their development of spontaneous trait inference.This study focused on the pupils from Grade 3 to Grade 6.The experiment adopted the horizontal design in developmental psychology and examined the reaction to real words(2 levels : implied-trait words which are consistent with behavior description sentences vs antonym)or false words of pupils from different grades(4levels: Grades 3 to 6)in lexical judgment task after completing the memory task of face and behavior description sentences.Among them,the grade is the inter-subject variable,and the type of the word is the intra-subject variable,the accuracy of reaction and reaction times are dependent variables.In addition,in order to test the correlation between children's spontaneous trait inference and their language ability,the experiment further examined the influence of the level of language proficiencydevelopment(2 levels: excellent group vs delayed group)on spontaneous trait inference at each grade level.The experimental analysis was conducted in two stages.In the first stage,the accuracy of all children's data was firstly analyzed by the variance of 2(spontaneous trait inference: implied-trait words vs antonym)× 4(Grades: Grade 3,Grade 4,Grade5,and Grade 6)× 2(groups of language ability: excellent group vs delayed group).The statistical results showed that there were main effects of spontaneous trait inference processing,Grades,and language proficiency in accuracy.The main effect of spontaneous trait inference was that the accuracy of implied-trait words is always higher than the antonym.The Grades main effects showed that there was no significant difference between Grade 3 and Grade 4 in accuracy,and there was no significant difference between Grade 5 and Grade 6 in accuracy,but there were significant differences between the other grades.The main effect of the language proficiency level is that the excellent group of language is always higher than the delayed group in the lexical judgment task.In the second stage,after eliminating the wrong trials,the same three-factor analysis of variance was used to analyze the reaction times again.The statistical results revealed the main effects of grades and the third-order interactions of spontaneous trait inference ? Grades and language ability.Among them,the main effects of grades showed no significant difference between Grade 3 and Grade 4 of reaction times,and there was no significant difference between Grade 5 and Grade 6of reaction times,but there were significant differences between the other grades.The analysis of the third-order interactions showed that the spontaneous trait inference effect only appeared in language excellent group of Grade 4.Based on the above results,the following conclusions are drawn from this study:(1)Different from findings of previous research,in this study,Chinese children have demonstrated stable spontaneous trait inference ability in the middle and high stage of primary school,and this ability gradually stable as grades increase.Enhanced,no significant decline in capacity.(2)The level of development of language proficiency affects the spontaneoustrait inference of pupil,and this mechanism is influenced by age.This shows that,as a concrete manifestation of the theory of mind,the development of children's spontaneous trait inference is affected by age and language development factors.(3)Grade 4(10 to 11 years old)of pupil is a critical period for the development of child spontaneous trait inference.As a result of the findings of this study,it is of great significance to strengthen mother-tongue education at different ages in the primary school.