CHILD PERSONALITY AND CULTURAL BACKGROUND

This research was done as a part of the synthetic research titled “Culture and Personality,” which has been carried on by the Human Relations Interdisciplinary Research Group, Department of Neuropsychiatry, Nagoya University School of Medicine, financially supported by Rockefeller Foundation. The chief of this research group is Prof. Muramatsu.<BR>To study the personality of pre-school children, a new personal test was made. It consists of twenty picture cards. Each of the cards shows some situation which is familiar to young children. Presenting these cards one by one, a tester explains to a testee the situation in the picture. Then the tester asks him to tell what the child in the picture will do or is doing. The testee, a young child, describes the situation, identifying himself with the child in the picture. Therefore his personality can be somewhat revealed by his description. To find out the personality of the testee through his description is the purpose of this test. It might be said that this test is a kind of questionnaire modified for pre-school children.<BR>176 children participated in this study. They were 4, 5, or 6-year-old children of kindergartens in one of the largest cities in Japan. Through this test we have studied how much effect the following seven factors had on the formation of a child´s personality: the sex of a child, the age of a child, his position as a sibling, the age of his mother, his mother´s academic career, the pattern of his family, and his family´s social class. These seven factors could be divided into three groups according to thecse attributes: 1) the child´s attributes, 2) his mother´s attributes, and 3) the attributes of his family. Relative to the child´s personality the three aspects-aggression or withdrawal; warmth or coldness; and independence or dependence-were taken up.<BR>The primary results of the study are the following. It was the child´s attributes that had the greatest influence on the formation of his personality. For instance, boys are more independent and more aggressive than girls. As they grow, both boys and girls incline to independence, withdrawal, and warmth. Personality of the first children is different from that of the last. These findings indicate that the parents do not expect all of their children to take the same role. The expected role differs according to whether the child is a boy or a girl, and according to whether he is the first or not. One child is brought up differently from his brothers and sisters. The difference of rearing brings the difference of the personality.<BR>The parents´attitudes toward child rearing depend on what they expect their child to be. And these attitudes may have a close relation with the second and the third attributes. In this sense, it can be said that even the second and third attributes had considerable indirect effect on the formation of child´s personality.