Perceived Maternal Childrearing Behavior and Motivational Effects of Social Reinforcement in Females

Abstract

Relationships between perceived maternal childtearing control and nurturance and the motivational effects of social reinforcement were tested for 66 college girls. Girls who perceived high maternal control (overpro-tected and rejected) were more motivationally influenced under all three experimental conditions (aspiration level after negative reinforcement, visual discrimination under negative and positive reinforcement, block design performance after positive reinforcement) than girls who perceived low maternal control (accepted and ignored). No effect of or interaction with maternal nurturance was found. Special implications of these findings for hypotheses derived from an earlier experiment with girls were discussed.

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