Children and the Aged: Attitudes, Contact, and Discriminative Ability

Abstract

Attitudes toward older versus younger persons, age discrimination performance, and seriation ability were assessed in sixty-eight three- to six-year-old children. Children's contact with people over seventy was also examined. Children preferred young people over old people in all situations in the attitudinal portion of the study. A significant relationship was found between children's ability to discriminate old people from young people and their ability to order objects from tallest to shortest. Accuracy on these two tasks improved with age. Frequency of contact was not found to significantly affect attitudes toward the elderly or ability to discriminate older from younger people.