The effects of social reinforcement and task difficulty level on the pleasure derived by normal and retarded children from cognitive challenge and mastery

In order to examine several factors influencing the pleasure derived from mastery, 32 normal first-grade children (mean MA = 7.7) and 32 MA-matched familial mentally retarded children were given puzzles representing four difficulty levels. Half of the children were socially reinforced for their successes and half performed in an experimenter-absent condition. There was more smiling among normal than retarded children, in the social reinforcement than in the experimenter-absent condition, and among girls than boys. The condition effect was greater for girls than boys. In the experimenter-absent condition, normal children displayed more pleasure on the difficult than on the easy puzzles, whereas the trend was just the reverse for the retarded children. Large within-sex differences were found for normal girls only, revealing that one subgroup derived more pleasure from the more difficult puzzles whereas another subgroup enjoyed the easier puzzles more. The findings were discussed in terms of the author's refinement of White's model of effectance motivation.