Causal explanations and judgments about children's potentially problematic behaviors

• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/2047/d20002763

Children with burgeoning psychological problems are not always correctly identified as having such problems, often do not receive necessary treatment at critical developmental periods, and subsequently suffer more serious dysfunction as adults (Garland et al., 2001; Miller, 1995; Yeh & Weisz, 2001). Why are children's early warning-sign behaviors overlooked? Previous work has shown that lay people perceive severely disordered adult behaviors as less disordered and less in need of intervention when given a plausible causal explanation (Ahn et al., 2003; Kim & LoSavio, 2009). The current work asked whether parents and lay adults without children are similarly influenced by provided and self-generated explanations for children's potentially problematic behaviors. The aims were threefold: (1) to examine the influence of explanations on judgments of potentially problematic child behaviors, (2) to assess whether the domain experience of parents influences problem category judgments, and lastly (3) to determine if self-generated explanations influence problem category judgments by increasing reasoners perceived understanding of the ambiguous child behaviors.