• Journal of the Korean Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry
• /
• v.10 no.1
• /
• pp.21-33
• /
• 1999

The clinical assessment for preschool children who are known to have problems in selfreporting tends to be dependent on outsiders' reporting. Thus, the direct assessment of children's inner experience, thoughts and feelings is difficult. MacArthur Story-Stem Battery(MSSB) developed to learn more about preschool children's mental representation in play is used in this study to help assess clinical preschool children through developmental study of normal children's mental representation. Fifty five children(32boys and 23girls) who performed MSSB, IQ Test, Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test-Revised(PPVT) were videotaped and were analyzed. The results of this study were as follows：1) Children frequently displayed negative mental representation such as atypical negative response, reparation/guilt, punishment, personal injury and so on during emotionally laden play situation. 2) Mental representation of parent appeared positive, disciplinary, and negative in respective. 3) As a result of factor analysis of MSSB content themes, aggressive, prosocial, and oppositional content theme composites were generated. Aggressive content included atypical negative response, aggression, personal injury, and exclusion. Prosocial content included affection, affiliation, and reparation/guilt. Oppositional content included punishment and non-compliance. 4) Mental representation of parent and content themes showed significant correlation. Positive, negative, and disciplinary representation were significantly correlated for prosocial(r=0.40), aggressive (r=0.52), and oppositional(r=0.75) content theme respectively. 5) Among the correlations between parental mental representations and emotional responses, positive parental representation and anxiety showed significant negative correlation(r=-0.43). 6) Among the correlations between content themes and emotional responses, there were significant positive correlations between aggressive(r=0.28) and oppositional content themes(r=0.29) and distress, and were significant negative correlations between prosocial content theme and concern(r=-0.29) and anxiety(r=-0.43). According to the above results, preschool children frequently displayed negative mental representation in emotionally conflictual play situation. Children with more prosocial themes in their stories exhibit more positive parental mental representation. Also, children with more aggressive themes tend to display more negative parental representation and negative emotional responses.