Gunderson et al.

(2013)
Background
 Research shows that how a child is praised impacts how their mental framework is
organized in the future.
 For example, if a parent praises a child’s effort, that child would grow to believe that
working hard can change achievements.
Person and process praise
 Person praise is when a child is praised (or berated) for the tasks they do, and not
their effort. This can lead to entity motivational framework, or fixed theory, which is
when they might not try as hard on a task, they think they mightn’t be as good at. It
can lead to the belief that they are born with/without an ability.
 Process praise is when children are praised for their effort, which as stated above,
can lead to incremental motivational framework, which is when they are able to
understand that ability is changeable, and put in more effort to change theirs for the
better.
Building on experimental evidence
 These ideas use Dweck’s mindset theory, as evidence and a basis for their own
investigation. One weakness of using this theory is that Dweck’s was done in a ‘lab’,
which is an artificial environment. This could lead to unnatural behavior from the
participants, (lacks ecological validity). Hence, Gunderson et al. wanted to use a
natural environment.
Praise and gender
 It has been shown that males are more likely to be given process praise, whilst
females are more likely to be given person praise. Hence, males tend to be more
incrementally motivated, whilst females are more entity motivated.

Aims
 Whether children were affected by different types of praise in a natural situation.
 Whether females received more person praise than process praise, in comparison to
males.
 Whether parents’ use of different types of praise affects the child’s
effort/motivation/etc., after five years.

Method
The study followed 53 children and their caretakers, including 29 boys and 24 girls. Parents’
use of praise was looked at when their children were 14 months, 26 months and 38 months
old. After five years the children’s mentalities, motivation, mental framework, etc. was
looked at and measured in relation to the prominent type of praise they received.

Participants
53 participants, 64% were white, 17% were black, 11% were Hispanic and 8% from
multiracial backgrounds.
Procedure
 Parents were unaware that the type of praise was being measured, in turn they
thought the experiment was about language development.
 Every time the researchers visited; the parents were instructed to go about a regular
day. The parent and child interactions were taped in 90-minute sessions.
Children’s later beliefs
 At around 7-8 years old, the children took two questionnaires about what they
thought caused you to be intelligent, and other things that would help determine
their mindset/framework.

Results
 Around 3% of the time parents were praising their children. Of that, 18% was
process and 16% was person.
 24.4% of praise for boys was process, but only 10.3% was for girls.
Parental praise and frameworks
 There was a correlation between the praise given to children, and the children’s
mindsets/frameworks when they became older (the correlation was 0.35). if a child
was given more process praise when younger, they would be more likely to put
effort in to gain results in the future.
 To test this, older children were looked at, to see their relationship with process
praise. They received process praise both for when they answered moral questions
and questions about intelligence.
 The results were that for both younger children and older children, 0.29 and 0.26
were the correlations, displaying how similar they were. The 3 different ages’
framework too was looked at for correlation, and they were 0.27, 0.21, 0.32, proving
that the conclusion was solid.
 However, the correlation for children developing an entity motivational framework
after receiving more person praise was -0.05, proving that there was no correlation.

Conclusions
 There was a direct correlation between receiving process praise and in turn
developing an incremental motivational framework.
 However, the studies aims were only partially supported due to the fact that it
wasn’t proved that person praise and entity motivational framework had any
correlation.
 Furthermore, boys receive more process praise than girls, resulting in more males
having an incremental motivational framework, while females usually attribute
failure to lack of ability, rather than a lapse in effort.

Strengths and weaknesses

Strengths
 Dweck’s findings under an artificial environment hold up in a naturalistic
environment too, giving it reliability.
 The researchers recording the videos didn’t know that parental praise was the focal
point. This is a strength as if the researchers knew, then the data gathered could be
compromised.
Weaknesses
 The ethics of the study can be criticized, as no one knew what the study was actually
about. If there had been a debrief at the end, the study may have been ethically
acceptable.
 Furthermore, parents may have changed their style of praise due to the fact that
they were being recorded, which may have affected the validity of the data, due to
the data not being natural.
 Only 53 parent/child pairings were used in this study, which limited the
generalizability of it.