Everyday Thinking of College Students and Their Parents and Students' Simulations of Each Parent's Thinking

Abstract

Each parent and 42 male and 76 female undergraduates separately completed Epstein and Meier's 1989 Constructive Thinking Inventory. Students also simulated each parent's inventory responses, generally depicting parental everyday thinking as more constructive than their own but less constructive than parents' actual responses and overestimating parental Naive Optimism and Categorical Thinking. On measures of Emotional Coping, Constructive Thinking, and Categorical Thinking, women scored below men, perhaps reflecting men's less concern about how others view them. Sons, but not daughters, significantly underestimated their mothers' Constructive Thinking. These and parallel father-related discrepancies correlated positively with student-reported conflict with either parent. Student-parent correlations were largely gender-concordant. Additional variables seem likely to influence the intergenerational transmission of everyday thinking.