Social Sensitivity among Young Children

Abstract

Forty-six eight-year-old children were given five tests of social sensitivity which were used to derive, for each child, a composite score of social sensitivity. The mother of each child was interviewed, and her responses to 20 questions concerning her child-rearing practices and relationship with her child yielded a measure of the mother's language code (restricted versus elaborated) and mode of control (personal versus positional). The results indicated that the child's degree of social sensitivity was positively and significantly associated with both the mother's use of elaborated language code (r = 0.36, P< 0.05) and a personal mode of control (r = 0.25, P< 0.05). However, partial correlations indicated that the primary association was between social sensitivity and language code (partial r = 0.27, P< 0.05) and that mode of control may be associated by confounding or through some other mechanism of influence (partial r = 0.01, n.s.).