Relationship of the children's form of the Rosenzweig Picture-Frustration Study to children's behavior, gender, and fantasies

A longitudinal study of changes in children's thought content in response to frustration on the Children's Picture-Frustration Study

A longitudinal design examined changes in the 11 response types on the Children's Form of the Picture-Frustration (P-F) Study. Eighty-six children were retested on the instrument after a 5-year interim. Children showed changes reflecting an increase in verbal aggression and an increase in making amends for wrongdoing. They showed decreases in unfocused emotional outbursts and apologies. The findings add to the literature on children's emotional development of aggression and guilt and on the validity of the instrument.

Validity of the Children's Picture-Frustration Study: a social-cognitive perspective

We used three studies to examine the validity of hostility scores from the Children's Form of the Picture-Frustration (P-F) Study in the context of Dodge's (1986) social information-processing model of aggression. Dodge's theory states that frustration results in retaliatory aggression only if the frustrated individual attributes hostile intent to the frustrator. Further, differences between aggressive and nonaggressive children in retaliatory aggression are more likely when the frustrator's intent is ambiguous than when the frustrator's intent is clear. In Study 1, items on the Children's P-F Study were rated by 237 children according to how mean they believed the frustrator in each item was. Results showed that items varied significantly in the amount of hostility portrayed. On the basis of these ratings, items were divided into those in which the intent was hostile, nonhostile, or ambiguous. In Studies 2 and 3, we tested Dodge's theory that differences between aggressive and nonaggressive children would be revealed on those items in which the frustrator's intention is ambiguous. In both studies, teacher's ratings of children's retaliatory aggression correlated significantly with the scale comprised of the ambiguous items but not with the scales comprised of the hostile or nonhostile items. The results provide further support to Dodge's theory of aggression and to the use of the Children's P-F Study within a social-cognitive perspective.