The Bears Family Projective Test: Evaluating Stories of Children with Emotional Difficulties

Abstract

The aim of this study was to describe and analyze the storytelling of children with emotional difficulties. Forty children with emotional and relational difficulties (inhibited and impulsive), ages between 5.5 and 9.4 years old, were assessed by a multiaxial procedure and the Bears Family Projective Test. The Bears Family Test is a constructive-thematic-projective method based on an anthropomorphic family of bears that children can manipulate to tell a story. The stories of 40 children without emotional difficulties (matched by IQ, socio-economic status, and gender) and 322 typically developing children, aged between four and 10 years old, were used as a reference for comparisons. Results indicated that the stories of children with emotional difficulties showed many unsolved problematic events, unclear characters, negative relationships, and negative behaviors. Unlike the stories of children without emotional difficulties, positive contents didn't prevail over negative, and there wasn't a positive compensation for negative elements.

Get full access to this article

View all access options for this article.

References

Achenbach

T. M.

(1991) Manual for the Child Behavior Checklist 4–18 and 1991 profiles. Burlington, VT: Univer. of Vermont, Department of Psychiatry.

Applebee

A. N.

(1978) The child's concept of story: Ages two to seventeen. Chicago: Univer. of Chicago Press.

Baars

B. J.

(1988) A cognitive theory of consciousness. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge Univer. Press.

Baddeley

(1997) Human memory: Theory and practice. (Rev. ed.) Hove, UK: Psychology Press.

Bechara

(2003) Risky business: Emotion, decision-making, and addiction. Journal of Gambling Studies, 19, 23–51.

Bechara

Damasio

(2005) The somatic marker hypothesis: A neural theory of economic decision. Games and Economic Behavior, 52, 336–372.

Bornstein

M. H.

Tamis-LeMonda

C. S.

(1995) The Bears Family: Cognitive coding handbook. Unpublished manuscript, National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, Bethesda, MD.

Botvin

G. J.

Sutton-Smith

(1977) The development of structural complexity in children's fantasy narratives. Developmental Psychology, 4(13), 377–388.

Bowlby

(1969) Attachment and loss: Attachment. Vol 1. New York: Basic Books.

10.

Brunas-Wagstaff

Bergquist

Morgan

Wagstaff

G. F.

(1996) Impulsivity interference on perceptual tasks, and hypothesis testing. Personality and Individual Differences, 20,471–482.

11.

Bruner

(1986) Actual minds, possible worlds. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univer. Press.

12.

Bruner

(1990) Acts of meaning. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univer. Press.

13.

Buss

A. H.

Plomin

(1984) Temperament: Early developing personality traits. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.

14.

Damasio

(2000) The feeling of what happens: Body, emotion, and the making of consciousness. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

15.

Dickman

S. J.

(1990) Functional and dysfunctional impulsivity: Personality and cognitive correlates. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 58, 95–102.

16.

Dodge

K. A.

(1991) Emotion and social information processing. In Garber

Dodge

K. A.

(Eds.), The development of emotion regulation and dysregulation. New York: Cambridge Univer. Press. Pp. 159–180.

17.

Eisenberg

Fabes

R. A.

Murphy

Maszk

Smith

Karbon

(1995) The role of emotionality and regulation in children's social functioning: A longitudinal study. Child Development, 66, 1360–1384.

18.

Feldman

C. F.

(1994) Genres as mental models. In Ammanniti

Stern

D. N.

(Eds.), Psychoanalysis and development: Representations and narratives. New York: New York Univer. Press. Pp. 111–121.

19.

Ferreira

V. S.

Slevc

L. R.

Rogers

E. S.

(2005) How do speakers avoid ambiguous linguistic expressions? Cognition, 96(3), 263–284.

20.

Frijda

N. H.

(1986) The emotions. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univer. Press.

21.

Goldsmith

H. H.

Buss

A. H.

Plomin

Rothbart

M. K.

Thomas

Chess

Hinde

R. A.

McCall

R. B.

(1987) Roundtable: What is temperament? Four approaches. Child Development, 58, 505–529.

22.

Gray

J. A.

McNaughton

(2000) The neuropsychology of anxiety. (2nd ed.) Oxford, UK: Oxford Univer. Press.

23.

Greenspan

S. I.

(1997) The growth of mind. Cambridge, MA: Perseus.

24.

Gross

J. J.

(1998) The emerging field of emotion regulation: An integrative review. Review of General Psychology, 2(3), 271–299.

25.

Gross

J. J.

(1999) Emotion regulation: Past, present, future. Cognition and Emotion, 13(5), 551–573.

26.

Hinshaw

S. P.

(1992) Externalizing behavior problems and academic underachievement in childhood and adolescence: Causal relationships and underlying mechanisms. Psychological Bulletin, 111, 127–155.

27.

Hollingshead

A. B.

(1975) Four factor index of social status. Unpublished manuscript, Department of Sociology, Yale Univer., New Haven, CT.

28.

Horton

W. S.

Keysar

(2006) When do speakers take into account common ground and perspective on domains of referential interpretation? Journal of Memory and Language, 49, 43–61.

29.

Iandolo

Esposito

Venuti

(in press) Cohesión, micro-organización, estructura narrativa y competencias verbales entre tres y once años: El desarrollo narrativo formal. Estudios de Psicología.

30.

Joel

Hinshaw

Huang-Pollok

(2006) Disorders of attention and impulse regulation. In Chicchetti

Cohen

(Eds.), Developmental psychopatology. Vol. 3. (2nd ed.) Hoboken, NJ: Wiley Pp. 358–403.

31.

Judge

Larsen

R. J.

(2001) Dispositional sources of job satisfaction: A review and theoretical extension. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 86, 67–98.

32.

Kagan

(1994) Galen's prophecy: Temperament in human nature. New York: Basic Books.

33.

Kagan

(2010) The temperamental thread: How genes, culture, time, and luck make us who we are. New York: Dana Press.

34.

Kagan

Reznick

J. S.

Snidman

Gibbons

Johnson

(1988) Childhood derivates of inhibition and lack of inhibition to the unfamiliar. Child Development, 59, 1580–1589.

35.

Kintsch

(1988) The role of knowledge in discourse comprehension: A construction-integration model. Psychological Review, 95(2), 163–182.

36.

Laible

Carlo

Torquati

Ontai

(2004) Children's perceptions of family relationships as assessed in a doll story completion task: Links to parenting, social competence, and externalizing behavior. Social Development, 13(4), 551–569.

37.

Lang

P. J.

Bradley

M. M.

Cuthbert

B. N.

(1998) Emotion, motivation, and anxiety: Brain mechanisms and psychophysiology Biological Psychiatry, 44, 1248–1263.

38.

Lang

P. J.

Bradley

M. M.

Cuthbert

B. N.

(2005) International affective picture system (IAPS): Affective rating of measures and instruction manual. (Tech. Rep. A-6) Gainesville, FL: Univer. of Florida.

39.

Larsen

R. J.

Buss

D. M.

(2008) Personality psychology: Domains of knowledge about human nature (3rd edition) New York: McGraw Hill.

40.

Lazarus

R. S.

Folkman

(1984) Stress, appraisal, and coping. New York: Springer.

41.

Mandler

(1984) Stories, scripts and scenes: Aspects of a schema theory. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.

42.

Mayseless

(2005) Ontogeny of attachment in middle childhood: Conceptualization of normative changes. In Kerns

K. A.

Richardson

R. A.

(Eds.), Attachment in middle childhood. New York: Guilford. Pp. 1–23.

43.

McCulloch

Wiggins

R. D.

Joshi

H. E.

Sachdev

(2000) Internalising and externalising children's behavior problems in Britain and the U.S.: Relationships to family resources. Children & Society, 14(5), 368–383.

44.

Moss

Bureau

J. F.

Béliveau

M. J.

Zdebik

Lépine

(2009) Links between children's attachment behavior at early school-age, their attachment-related representations, and behavior problems in middle childhood. International Journal of Behavioral Development, 33(2), 155–166.

45.

Nelson

(1981) Social cognition in a script framework. In Flavell

J. H.

Ross

(Eds.), Social cognitive development. New York: Cambridge Univer. Press. Pp. 97–118.

46.

Nelson

(1993) The psychological and social origins of autobiographical memory. Psychological Science, 4, 1–8.

47.

Nelson

(1996) The emergence of the mediated mind. New York: Cambridge Univer. Press.

48.

Nilsen

E. S.

Graham

S. A.

(2009) The relations between children's communicative perspective-taking and executive functioning. Cognitive Psychology, 58, 220–249.

49.

Norman

D. A.

Shallice

(1986) Attention to action: Willed and automatic control of behavior. Centre for Human Information Processing Technical Report No. 99. Reprinted in revised form in Davidson

R. J.

Schwarts

G. E.

Shapiro

(Eds.), Consciousness and self-regulation: Advances in research and theory. Vol. 4. New York: Plenium. Pp. 1–18.

50.

Oatley

Johnson-Laird

P. N.

(1987) Towards a cognitive theory of emotions. Cognition and Emotion, 1, 29–50.

51.

Oppenheim

Nir

Warren

Emde

R. N.

(1997) Emotion regulation in mother-child narrative co-construction: Associations with children's narratives and adaptation. Developmental Psychology, 33, 1–11.

52.

Piaget

(1955) The child's construction of reality. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

53.

Pulkkinen

(1996) Female and male personality styles: A typological and developmental analysis. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 70, 1288–1306.

54.

Ramos-Marcuse

Arsenio

W. F.

(2001) Young children's emotionally charged moral narratives: Relations with attachment and behavior problems. Early Education & Development, 12, 165–184.

55.

Rothbart

M. K.

Bates

J. E.

(2006) Temperament. In Damon

(Ser. Ed.) & Eisenberg

(Eds.), Handbook of child psychology. Vol. 3. Social, emotional, and personality development. (6th ed.) Hoboken, NJ: Wiley. Pp. 105–176.

56.

Scherer

(1984) On the nature and function of emotion: A component process approach. In Scherer

K. R.

Ekman

P. E.

(Eds.), Approaches to emotion. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum. Pp. 293–317.

57.

Schwarz

Clore

G. L.

(1983) Mood, misattribution, and judgments of well-being: Informative and directive functions of affective states. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 45, 513–523.

58.

Siegel

D. J.

(1999) The developing mind. New York: Guilford.

59.

Strelau

(2001) The concept and status of trait in research on temperament. European Journal of Personality, 15, 311–325.

60.

Trevarthen

Aitken

(2003) Infant intersubjectivity: Research, theory, and clinical applications. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 42(1), 3–48.

61.

Tulving

(1983) Elements of episodic memory. Oxford, UK: Clarendon.

62.

Tulving

(2002) Episodic memory: From mind to brain. Annual Review of Psychology, 53, 1–25.

63.

Van Dijk

T. A.

(1980) Macrostructures: An interdisciplinary study of global structures in discourse, interaction, and cognition. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.

64.

Venuti

Cesari

(1998) Proposta di un nuovo metodo proiettivo “La Famiglia degli Orsi.” In Lis

(Ed.), Tecniche proietive per l'indagine di personalità. Bologna, Italy: Il Mulino.

65.

Venuti

Iandolo

(2003) The Bears Family Projective Test. Unpublished manuscript, Univer. of Trento, Italy.

66.

Vygotsky

L. S.

(1934) Thought and language. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

67.

Wallace

J. F.

Newman

J. P.

Bachorowsky

J. A.

(1991) Failures of response modulation: Impulsive behavior in anxious and impulsive individuals. Journal of Research in Personality, 25, 23–44.

68.

Warren

S. L.

Oppenheim

Emde

R. N.

(1996) Can emotions and themes in children's play predict behavior problems? Journal of American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, 34, 1331–1337.

69.

Watson

(2000) Mood and temperament. New Yok: Guilford Press.

70.

Wechsler

(1967) Manual for the Wechsler Preschool and Primary Scale of Intelligence. New York: Psychological Corporation.

71.

Wechsler

(1974) Manual for the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children-Revised. New York: Psychological Corporation.

72.

White

J. L.

Moffitt

T. E.

Caspi

Bartusch

D. J.

Needles

D. J.

Stouthamer-Loeber

(1994) Measuring impulsivity and examining its relationship to delinquency. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 103, 192–205.

73.

Winnicott

(1965) The family and individual development. London: Routledge.

74.

Woolgar

Steele

Yabsley

Fonagy

(2001) Children's play narrative responses to hypothetical dilemmas and their awareness of moral emotions. British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 19, 115–128.

75.

Zelazo

P. D.

Muller

Frye

Marcovitch

(2003) The development of executive function: Cognitive complexity and control-revised. Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development, 69(3), 93–119.

76.

Zeman

Shipman

Suveg

(2002) Anger and sadness regulation: Predictions to internalizing and externalizing symptoms in children. Journal of Clinical Child and Adolescent Psychology, 31, 393–398.