Abstract
In this paper, we demonstrate that, in accordance with research on adults, children with high implicit power motive show power stress when their need for influence cannot be satisfied. Participants, ranging between 8 and 11 years of age, had to convince a puppet to drink apple juice after they were made aware of the puppet’s dislike for the juice. Half of the children encountered a cooperative puppet; the other half encountered an uncooperative puppet that rejected attempts to get it to try the juice. Results showed participants with a high implicit power motive showed more negative affect when their efforts to convince the puppet to drink the juice failed. Implications for research on power stress in children and further directions are discussed.
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Notes
According to Fodor (2010), power stress is defined as both the event blocking the satisfaction (i.e., the stressor) of the need, and the reaction to it (i.e., the actual stress). However, researchers (e.g., Green 1986) have criticized the confounding of stressor and stress. We, therefore, restrict our definition of power stress to the reaction to the thwarted satisfaction of n Power.
Children in Luxembourg are instructed, and alphabetized in German from first grade on (age 6). Most children’s first language was Luxembourgish (33.3%), 15.7 % spoke mainly German at home. The remaining children spoke French, Portuguese or other languages. This is, by and large, representative for Luxembourg (Grand-Duché de Luxembourg, Le Portail des Statistiques 2017).
Only one case with deviant story content was identified. Assuming the child did not see the pictures, we re-run all analyses without this case which did not change any of the results.
Due to the variety in language backgrounds, we checked if children who spoke German at home wrote longer stories than children who did not. There was no difference between these two groups [t(105) = − 0.34, 95% BCa CI (− 47.52, 33.94), p = .74, d = .09]. Also, there was no difference in n Power scores between children who spoke German versus children speaking other languages at home [t(105) = − 0.05, 95% BCa CI (− 0.73, 0.67), p = .97, d = .01].
Although the distribution of n Power (residualized) was skewed (value: .66, z-score: 2.81, p < .001, no significant value for kurtosis: .58, z-score: 1.24, p > .05), we based our decision to not transform n Power on the K–S test and the graphical representation of the distribution, which is in accordance with statistical practice (Field 2015)
We checked for the distribution of n Power scores in each condition (i.e., success vs. failure) to make sure that there was no bias of n Power in either group. According to test statistics (K-S test for success: D(55) = .08, p = .20, for failure: D(53) = .12, p = .06) and graphical representation, both distributions were approximately normal
We tested the effectiveness of the manipulation, posterior to the experiment, with a different sample (N = 28, age: M = 8.25, SD = 0.97, range 7–11, 57.1% male) by showing them a video of both the success and the failure condition, asking, for each case, if they found the puppet cooperative or not. All 28 children correctly classified the behavior of the puppet in the success condition as cooperative. In the failure condition, 27 out of 28 children correctly identified the puppet as non-cooperative. We, therefore, concluded the manipulation is appropriate to distinguish between cooperative and non-cooperative puppet behavior in 8-to 11-year-old children.
As there were no age effects found for children with SAM or SAS (McManis et al. 2001; Pothmann and Goepel 1984), there was no necessity to include age as an additional covariate. However, for the sake of completeness, we also ran all models with gender and age as covariates. Age was above p = .20 in all cases. This confirmed our approach of leaving this variable out.
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Acknowledgements
We would like to thank Patrick Victor for his essential role in data collection, Jan Hofer and Holger Busch for very helpful comments on earlier drafts of this manuscript, and Nora Hogrebe, and Ellen Kerpen for proofreading. The study reported in this paper was not pre-registered.
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CR: contributed to the study design, data analysis, and manuscript writing. GH: have contributed to the study design and the data collection.
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Raihala, C., Hansen, G. Power stress in primary school children. Motiv Emot 43, 82–92 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11031-018-9724-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11031-018-9724-0