Brief Report Preschoolers ' Evaluations of Physical Disabilities: A Consideration of Attitudes and Behavior

Assessed preschoolers ' attitudes about orthopedicalty handicapped individuals with a standard picture-ranking task. Children generally exhibited a functionally related preference for nonhandicapped individuals. One month later, the same children were videotaped reading and playing basketball with a female adult in a wheelchair or in a chair. Preferences for a normal play partner during reading or during sports on the picture-ranking task did not relate to frequency of social interactions. Liking preference for a normal play partner, in conjunction with gender of the child, predicted frequency of social interactions during both tasks regardless of examiner's handicap status. Thus, the adoption of a negative bias had a general influence; any potential behavioral biases, as reflective of prefer-ence biases, were undifferentiated and unfocused in these preschoolers. KEY WORDS: prachookn; physical disabilities; attitude * and behaviors. Very young children are aware of various dimensions along which to describe and characterize themselves and other people and come to hold adult preferences and stereotypes. Children report negative attitudes toward peers with physical handicaps (Harper, Wacker, & Cobb, 1986; Perlman & Routh, 1980; Rich-ardson, 1970) and often behave negatively toward these individuals (Perlman & Routh, 1980). The present research extends this work on children's evaluations of physically handicapped individuals in two important ways. First, we assessed preschoolers, which is a younger group of children than in most prior research. Second, we assessed both attitudes about and behavior toward individuals wit