A few weeks a go a friend of mine was talking about two different types of praise that she learned in her education class. The two types of praise were called process praise and person praise. If you take phycology you may be familiar with these terms and what makes them different. For those of us who are not comfortable with distinguishing the two types of praise, Romeo Vitelli Phd article in phycology today goes into great detail in underscoring the fundamental difference between the two. In order to recognize the difference between the two you simply need to understand is the following, person praise is praise directed at a child’s personal qualities whereas process praise is praise directed at how the child behaves. So, my question is which method of praise is more beneficial to children?

From the beginning of my research all arrows pointed towards process praise as the better of the two forms of praise; however it was unclear as to why exactly this was. Let us take a look at some of the studies conducted throughout the years proving this claim.

An article written by William Harms titled, “Parents who praise effort can bolster children’s persistence, self-belief” examines a study where 53 children and their parents were each filmed three times during everyday interactions, when the children were between one and three years old. Researches analyzed the tapes and found occurrences where the parents either used process, person praise, or other praise. Researchers followed up on the children when they were 7 to 8 years old and gauged whether they preferred challenging versus easy tasks. Additionally, the researchers analyzed whether the children were capable of coming up with strategies for dealing with setbacks. The conclusion of the study yielded three interesting outcomes: parents of boys used a larger percentage of process praise than those of girls, children who received a larger percentage of process praise used more positive techniques while encountering a challenge and they believed that intelligence and personality traits are traits that can be changed (Harms). In order to insure that this study was not an outlier I researched the matter further.

The article, “Person versus process praise and criticism: implications for contingent self-worth and coping” explains a study conducted on 67 children, ages 5 to 6 years, in which the children received either process praise or personal praise following the completions of activities that resulted in setbacks. So, the x-independent variable would be the praise, while the y-dependent variable would be the level of helplessness of the children when faced with setbacks. The findings of the study indicated that those children who received personal praise were described as more helpless while performing tasks that yielded setbacks.

This experiment was set up in a similar manor as the previous study discussed, with the exception that in this study the children were given controlled tasks; whereas, the previous study is a compilation of interactions. Nevertheless, this experiment generated the same conclusion as the previous experiment discussed, thus, building on the validity of the first experiment discussed. It was becoming clearer that process praise is more beneficial to children in comparison to personal praise; however, I wanted to ensure this claim to a further extent, but maybe with a slightly altered perspective.

An article titled, “In Praise of Children” in Psychology Today lead me to a series of two studies, which drew similar conclusions to the last study I discussed. The studies discussed in the article can be found in more detail here. Although the studies conveyed a similar outcome as the previous studies discussed, it analyzed praise through a slightly different lens, looking into how it affected the children coupled with their self-esteem.

In the first of the two studies, 357 Dutch parents were placed into potential situations where they were dealing with either a child with high self-esteem or low self-esteem, and they were described a child’s performance. The parents where then required to give praise depending on the description of the child’s performance. The researchers then analyzed the praise and divided it into two categories: process praise and personal praise. The outcome of the study displayed an alluring result. They found that parents were twice as likely to give process praise to children with low self-esteem than those with high-self esteem; thus, children with high self-esteem were more likely to receive process praise.

The second of the two studies, had 313 children between the ages of eight and thirteen play two rounds of an online reaction game known as “Go!”. The first round of the game was a practice round where at the conclusion the Webmaster gave either a person praise or process praise to the child. Additionally, there was a no-praise case outcome in order to serve as a control. The following round of the game held pretests and posttest that measured how the children felt emotionally; however this rounds outcomes were situations in which the students either won or lost. At the conclusion of the game, once they found out if they won or lost, the children received process praise or personal praise. The researchers concluded that students who received personal praise were more likely to feel shame after losing. Similar to the first study, students who had low self-esteem were affected more heavily than those who did not have low self-esteem.

These two studies underscored the fact that personal praise not only is more beneficial to children when compared to personal praise; but, that the negative impacts of personal praise affect those with a low self-esteem more heavily than those children with high self-esteem. My only question of the study was how they evaluated the children’s self esteem. I was curious on this matter because I see much difficulty in determining a child’s self-esteem in a universal manor that was accurate. Aside from my question, I see little room for error.

Take home message: Process praise is far more beneficial to children in comparison to personal praise. So, if you are trying to motivate and positively influence a little sibling or any other child stick with process praise.