Differences Between Mother and Peer Listeners in the Encouragement Of Perspective-Taking

honors thesisCollege of Social & Behavioral SciencePsychologyMonisha PasupathiExisting literature implicates perspective-taking, the cognitive and affective process by which an individual comes to understand the viewpoint of another, in a broad variety of desirable outcomes. Although scaffolding is an oft-researched topic, there is little extant work on how scaffolding may encourage perspective-taking, particularly in conversations about anger. This study coded the conversations ( N = 200) of adolescents between 12 and 14 years old to examine differences between mothers' and peers' listening behaviors and differences in the adolescents' behaviors with each type of listener. The participants generated the conversation topics themselves, and all were about recent experiences of anger. We made five a priori hypotheses, all of which broadly anticipated that desirable perspective-taking behavior in early adolescence would occur more frequently in response to the scaffolding of adolescents' mothers than in response to the scaffolding of adolescents' peers. Our findings indicate that mothers were more likely to scaffold perspective-taking than peers were and that adolescents were more likely to respond with perspective-taking to maternal scaffolding than peer scaffolding, but that differences in adolescent perspective-taking with mothers and peers were non-significant when controlling for scaffolding frequency. We conclude by discussing our findings and future directions for research