Communicating sympathy and anger to Black and White children: The cognitive (attributional) consequences of affective cues.

This study examined the influence of affective cues from others on children's achievement-related cognitions and performance following failure. Black and white children of middle and low social class were induced to fail an achievement task and an experimenter communicated either sympathy, anger, or no affective reaction. Children's judgments of personal competence, expectancies for success, causal attributions for failure, and persistence on the task were measured. Across all Race X Social Class groups, there were linkages between communicated sympathy and low ability self-ascriptions and between communicated anger and lack of effort attributions, although the sympathy-ability relation was stronger than the anger-effort linkage. In addition, a greater decline in expectancy for success followed the emotional cue of sympathy. These findings were interpreted as further evidence of the role of emotions in an attributional theory of motivation. When the data were examined independent of affective cues, middle-class black children displayed a particularly adaptive attributional pattern. Compared with the other three demographic groups, these children attributed their failure more to insufficient effort, reported higher expectancies, perceived themselves as more competent, and persisted longer at the task. The implications of these findings for comparative racial research are discussed.