Role of intelligence and task difficulty in the affective learning styles of children with high and low self-concepts

Fifth-graders prerated both abstract and concrete nouns for likability, and paired-associate lists were constructed by pairing nouns (liked with liked and disliked with disliked). As predicted, the high self-concept (Piers-Harris Self-Concept Scale) children learned their liked noun pairs more efficiently than their disliked pairs, while the low self-concept children reversed and learned their disliked noun pairs more readily. Further analysis revealed that these self-concept patterns were most pronounced for low-IQ (Lorge-Thorndike Intelligence Test) children. High-IQ children, who were superior to low-IQ children in overall learning, showed no preference for their affective evaluations in learning. Increasing task difficulty (e.g., by increasing work abstractness) resulted in a tendency to learn disliked items more readily than liked items. (19 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2006 APA, all rights reserved).