AFFIRMATION AND DENIAL IN EVALUATIVE DESCRIPTIONS

Children made a series of evaluative judgements of 20 nonsense words, which they were told to imagine were people's names. Each subject judged half the names in terms of two-category rating scales containing an affirmative (A) response category which was evaluatively positive (E +) and a negative (n) category which was evaluatively negative (E -), e.g. ‘happy-not happy’, the other half were judged in terms of scales where the A category was E -, and the N category E +, e.g. ‘rude - not rude’. The main finding was a highly significant tendency for subjects to give more A than N responses, irrespective of evaluative content: in addition, a tendency for subjects to give more E - than E + responses, irrespective of grammatical form, approached significance.