The establishment of trust is an important symbol of social adjustment of individuals, which influences the building of individual's interpersonal relationship, affects the formation of cooperation, contributes to the harmony of interpersonal relationships, and is closely related to individual's own development and mental health (Bernath & Feshbach, 1995; Rotenberg et al. , 2005; Rotter, 1967). Trust also is one of the meanings of integrity (Wu & Huang, 2012), which plays an important role in economic and social development (Knack & Keefer, 1997). Researchers have adopted various paradigms to explore children’s generalized trust and epistemic trust. Nevertheless, very few researches has probed into young children’s generalized trust and studied the relationship between generalized trust and epistemic trust. The current study aimed to explore preschool children’s development of generalized trust and epistemic trust. In Study One, a further advancement of the existed researches on parental transmission of generalized trust is conducted, trying to investigate whether preschoolers’ generalized trust could be influenced by their parents. Furthermore, Study One explores whether trusting children will turn to be less trusting when positive feedback is absent. Study Two takes epistemic trust as specific trust, and adopts both “single-source” paradigm and “conflicting sources” paradigm to investigate the development of preschoolers’ epistemic trust and its affecting factors. The research will enrich the theory of trust development as well as provide educational practices with the implications of psychological theory. In present research, sixty-four 4-year-old, sixty-two 5-yerar-old and sixty-three 6-year-old children were recruited from kindergartens. Multiple tasks were employed to investigate children’s development of generalized trust and epistemic trust and their affecting factors. The main findings are as follows:1) From 4 to 6 years old, the children’s generalized trust declines with age; 2) The level of generalized trust of 6-year-old children is significantly related with their parent’s trust level and the characteristic of parental transmission. Furthermore, the transmission is not influenced by children’s secure attachment level and perspective-taking ability; 3) Preschool children will turn to be less trusting after negative feedback is given, showing that they could learn from the experience in trust development; 4) In “single-source” paradigm, 4 to 6 years old children do not differ significantly in epistemic trust; 5) In “single-source” paradigm, 6 year old children’s epistemic trust is significantly related with their generalized trust; 6) In “conflicting sources” paradigm, preschool children’s epistemic trust is influenced by children’s age and the familiarity and status of the informant.
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