ension of narrative forms, research on children's understanding of other people indicates similar age-related trends. As was noted in the first section, general cognitive development research has shown decided age changes in children's understanding about other people--in particular, there is movement from egocentric to nonegocentric views of others occurring about by middle childhood and the development of the concrete operational stage of development. Just as children are developing an understanding of others' points of view, their impressions of other people change in terms of the kinds of characteristics focused on to describe others. Several studies of children's descriptions of their friends and others have noted age-related changes in the content of these free descriptions (Dornbush et al., 1965; Peevers and Secord, 1973; Scariett et al., 1971; Livesly and Bromley, 1973). The general dimensions of change appear to be that as children grow older they describe others less often in terms of external characteristics, such as overt physical descriptions and appearances, and more in terms of "internal" characteristics, such as personality traits and motivations. Wartella and Alexander (1977) report similar findings for second-, fifth-, and eighth-grade children's descriptions of television characters. They asked children to describe a television father, mother, and child. While the preponderance of descriptions at each age level focused on the actions the characters performed, eighth graders used more personality trait and motivational state descriptors than did fifth or second graders. Second graders, on the other hand, were more likely to describe the characters in terms of physical characteristics, appearances, and possessions. Moreover, the fifth- and eighth-grade children were more likely to attribute causes to the character behaviors they discussed by making references to the character's motivations for the behaviors. Similar fin...
