Scale of Praise Given by Primary Caregivers to Infants

Abstract

The Scale of Praise Given by Primary Caregivers to Infants (Escala de Elogios Otorgados por Cuidadores Primarios a Infantes; Mancini et al., 2023) is a 13-item self-report psychometric instrument designed to evaluate the typologies and frequencies of positive verbal feedback administered by parents and primary caregivers to young children aged 0 to 36 months. Developed in Argentina to address the critical methodological absence of rapid, scalable self-report measures in early childhood parenting research, the instrument operationalizes parental feedback across three distinct, theoretically established dimensions: Process Praise (elogio al proceso), Person Praise (elogio a la persona), and Product Praise (elogio al producto). Originating from an initial 17-item pool derived from foundational developmental literature and vetted through expert judgment, psychometric refinement via exploratory factor analysis (principal axis factoring with direct Oblimin rotation and parallel analysis) supported a three-factor solution and the retention of 13 high-performing items. This three-factor model explains 57% of the total cumulative variance. The subscales demonstrate satisfactory to high internal consistency: Process praise exhibited robust reliability (α = .91), while Product praise (α = .74) and Person praise (α = .73) showed adequate internal consistency. The instrument presents a 5-point Likert scale (ranging from 1 = Never to 5 = Very often) administered electronically, providing developmental psychologists, pediatric clinicians, and parenting researchers with a standardized tool to examine early parental communication patterns and their subsequent contributions to toddler motivation, self-concept, and cognitive resilience.

Keywords

Caregivers, Early Childhood Development, Family and Parenting Measures, Infants, Parent Child Communication, Parent Child Relations, Parenting Style, Positive Feedback, Praise, Praise of Person, Praise of Process, Praise of Product, Praise Self Report, Primary Caregiver Praise, Self-Report, Types of Praise

Authors

The Scale of Praise Given by Primary Caregivers to Infants was developed and psychometrically validated by a research team based in Buenos Aires, Argentina:

• Natalia A. Mancini — Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas (CONICET), Argentina. Email: [email protected]
• Christian Schetsche — Universidad de Buenos Aires (UBA), Argentina. Email: [email protected]
• Leandro J. Morales — Universidad de Buenos Aires (UBA), Argentina. Email: [email protected]
• Ailín C. Simaes — Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas (CONICET), Argentina. Email: [email protected]
• Lucas G. Gago Galvano — Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas (CONICET), Argentina. Email: [email protected]

Purpose

The fundamental purpose of the Scale of Praise Given by Primary Caregivers to Infants is to provide a reliable, validated, and brief self-report methodology to assess the frequency and qualitative typologies of praise delivered by primary caregivers to infants and toddlers aged 0 to 36 months. For decades, developmental psychology has documented that verbal interactions between parents and infants are among the most influential mechanisms driving early cognitive socialization, regulatory competence, and affective development. Within these verbal inputs, positive evaluative feedback—commonly termed praise—serves as an early scaffold for children’s nascent self-evaluative frameworks, causal attribution tendencies, and intrinsic motivation.

Historically, the empirical investigation of parental praise has relied almost exclusively on intensive observational coding procedures conducted in laboratory settings or through transcribed home video recordings (e.g., Gunderson et al., 2013). While naturalistic observational techniques provide high ecological fidelity, they impose profound logistical burdens: they require extensive video capture equipment, demand dozens of hours of verbatim transcription, require multi-rater training to maintain inter-rater reliability, and may trigger social desirability biases such as the Hawthorne effect. Furthermore, observational sessions are frequently limited to brief 60- to 90-minute cross-sectional windows that may fail to capture lower-frequency verbal practices across diverse daily routines. Consequently, large-scale epidemiological, clinical, and community-based developmental investigations have historically lacked a rapid, cost-effective screening or survey instrument to measure caregiver praise.

The scale developed by Mancini and colleagues (2023) directly bridges this psychometric gap. Designed specifically for primary caregivers of children in the first three years of life (0–3 years), it enables researchers and clinicians to:

• Quantify the relative balance of motivational feedback forms (process, person, and product praise) used within the home.
• Identify parental communication styles that inadvertently promote maladaptive entity theories of ability (fixed mindsets) or vulnerability to failure at early developmental milestones.
• Evaluate the efficacy of parenting intervention programs aimed at enhancing responsive, growth-oriented parental communicative practices.
• Investigate cross-cultural and socioeconomic variations in early parental feedback within Latin American and Spanish-speaking populations, where validated measures of early verbal interaction have historically been underrepresented.

Psychological Construct

The construct assessed by this instrument is Parental Praise, conceptualized as positive evaluative verbal utterances delivered by a primary caregiver in response to a child’s actions, efforts, qualities, or accomplishments. Rather than treating praise as a unidimensional, monolithic positive reinforcer, modern psychometric and developmental models conceptualize it as a multidimensional communicative behavior that conveys subtle attributional messages regarding competence, agency, and worth. The Scale of Praise Given by Primary Caregivers to Infants operationalizes this construct across three correlated, theoretically grounded dimensions:

1. Process Praise (Elogio al Proceso)

Process praise encompasses caregiver utterances that specifically evaluate and validate the child’s behaviors, effort, persistence, strategic problem-solving, or cognitive engagement during an activity. By explicitly linking parental approval to malleable, controllable factors (e.g., trying different tactics, maintaining focus, sustained exertion), process praise conveys an incremental belief about capability. In this scale, process praise is manifested in statements such as “¡Qué bien te esforzaste!” (How well you tried/exerted yourself!) and “¡Me encanta cómo intentaste resolverlo!” (I love how you tried to solve it!). When infants and toddlers receive high proportions of process feedback, they learn that competence is dynamic and acquired through active exploration, which subsequently buffers against learned helplessness upon encountering task difficulty.

2. Person Praise (Elogio a la Persona)

Person praise consists of global evaluative statements that target the child’s fixed, innate traits, intrinsic characteristics, or personal worth. Rather than evaluating what the child did, person praise evaluates who the child is. Typical manifestations include comments regarding innate intelligence, talent, or global goodness, such as “¡Qué inteligente sos!” (How smart you are!) and “¡Sos un genio / una genia!” (You are a genius!). Although intended to build self-esteem, psychometric separation of this dimension is vital because developmental literature demonstrates that person praise encourages children to interpret both success and failure as direct reflections of stable, unalterable internal traits. This attributional style can lead to emotional distress, shame, and task avoidance when performance falters.

3. Product Praise (Elogio al Producto)

Product praise constitutes evaluative utterances that direct the infant’s attention toward the tangible, observable outcome, artifact, or final accomplishment of their activity, independent of the effort expended or innate traits. Examples within the scale include “¡Qué lindo dibujo te quedó!” (What a pretty drawing you made!) and “¡Qué hermosa torre construiste!” (What a beautiful tower you built!). While often conflated with process praise in broad behavioral frameworks, the psychometric delineation of product praise acknowledges that parents frequently focus praise on the aesthetic or physical result of toddler play. Product praise provides concrete, sensory-based recognition of completion, which plays an important, distinct role in early cognitive categorizations of task success.

Theoretical Framework

The construction and validation of the scale are firmly anchored in Carol S. Dweck’s Implicit Theories of Intelligence (Mindset Theory), integrated with contemporary models of Attribution Theory (Weiner, 1985) and empirical infancy paradigms (Gunderson et al., 2013, 2018; Kelley et al., 2000; Lucca et al., 2019).

Mindset Theory and Causal Attributions

According to Dweck’s framework, individuals hold foundational implicit beliefs regarding the nature of human abilities. An entity theory posits that intelligence and competence are fixed, biologically determined, and static traits. In contrast, an incremental theory posits that cognitive and behavioral capabilities are malleable attributes that grow through effort, deliberate practice, and strategic problem-solving. Landmark experimental research (e.g., Mueller & Dweck, 1998) established that the qualitative nature of adult verbal feedback functions as a potent socialization vector for these beliefs. Process praise reinforces an incremental mindset by attributing outcomes to controllable, malleable causes, whereas person praise instills an entity mindset by attributing success to uncontrollable, fixed traits.

Extending the Paradigm to Early Infancy

While early experimental research focused primarily on school-age children and adolescents, longitudinal research by Gunderson and colleagues (2013, 2018) revolutionized the field by showing that maternal praise types documented during naturalistic home interactions between 14 and 38 months of age prospectively predicted children’s incremental mindsets at 7 to 8 years old, which in turn predicted their academic achievement in mathematics and reading. Further work by Lucca et al. (2019) and Kelley et al. (2000) demonstrated that infants as young as 14 to 24 months are sensitive to affective verbal feedback and alter their persistence, social referencing, and task re-engagement based on caregiver responses.

Despite this understanding, empirical models often debated how to classify praise that targets the final output of an activity (e.g., an assembled puzzle, a finished tower). Mancini and colleagues (2023) synthesized these perspectives by formalizing a tripartite operational structure: separating Process (mechanisms of action), Person (fixed personal traits), and Product (tangible outputs). This theoretical structure reflects how caregivers naturally communicate with infants during daily play routines (drawing, building blocks, dancing, or learning basic self-help skills).

Validity

The validation program of the Scale of Praise Given by Primary Caregivers to Infants documented several key psychometric properties, while also identifying areas requiring future empirical investigation:

Content Validity and Item Generation

Initial content validity was established through a structured item-generation phase. The original 17 items were formulated based on phrases identified in published observational literature on early caregiver-child interaction (e.g., Gunderson et al., 2013; Kelley et al., 2000; Lucca et al., 2019). The draft items were submitted to a panel of expert developmental psychologists and psychometricians who evaluated each item’s ecological suitability for caregivers of children aged 0 to 36 months, its conceptual clarity, and its theoretical alignment with Process, Person, or Product praise. Expert feedback refined ambiguous phrasing to align with natural Argentinian Spanish idioms (e.g., using regional colloquialisms such as “sos” and “quedó”).

Construct and Structural Validity

Construct validity was evaluated empirically using exploratory factor analysis (EFA). The three-factor solution provided empirical evidence that primary caregivers distinguish process, person, and product praise as separate behavioral dimensions when interacting with infants. The reduction of the initial 17 items to 13 items removed items with high cross-loadings or inadequate communalities, which improved the total variance accounted for from 50% to 57%.

Limitations and Validity Gaps

As noted in the primary psychometric report by Mancini et al. (2023):

• Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA): A CFA was not performed in the initial validation cohort, meaning structural replication in an independent sample remains necessary.
• Convergent and Discriminant Validity: Formal empirical associations with established measures (such as parental warmth, parenting stress, or maternal mind-mindedness) were not reported in the foundational study.
• Criterion-Related Validity: Future research needs to compare self-reported praise scores on this scale against objective behavioral codings of home video recordings to establish concurrent behavioral validity and quantify the impact of social desirability response styles.

Reliability

The internal consistency of the Scale of Praise Given by Primary Caregivers to Infants was established across each of its extracted factors using Cronbach’s alpha (α) coefficients calculated from the final 13-item model:

• Process Praise Subscale (Elogio al Proceso): Demonstrated excellent internal consistency, with a Cronbach’s alpha of α = .91. This indicates strong item homogeneity among items assessing caregiver reinforcement of effort, persistence, and strategic problem-solving.
• Product Praise Subscale (Elogio al Producto): Demonstrated satisfactory internal consistency, with a Cronbach’s alpha of α = .74, indicating reliable measurement of caregiver commentary focused on completed tasks and physical creations.
• Person Praise Subscale (Elogio a la Persona): Demonstrated adequate internal consistency, with a Cronbach’s alpha of α = .73, meeting standard psychometric thresholds for research instruments measuring broad personality trait attributions.

At the time of original publication, longitudinal test-retest reliability data (temporal stability) and McDonald’s omega (ω) hierarchical coefficients had not yet been established. The reported Cronbach’s alpha metrics nonetheless demonstrate that each subscale possesses sufficient internal coherence for research applications in early childhood and family psychology.

Factor Analysis

The dimensionality of the 17-item experimental version was examined via an Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) using psychometrically rigorous extraction and rotation methods:

Extraction and Rotation Procedures

Factor extraction was carried out using the Principal Axis Factoring (Ejes Principales) method, which is well-suited for non-normal behavioral rating data because it makes no distributional assumptions. To determine the optimal number of latent factors to retain, the authors utilized two complementary criteria: an inspection of the empirical Scree Plot (Cattell’s criterion) and Horn’s Parallel Analysis. Both criteria converged in supporting the extraction of three distinct latent dimensions.

Given that praise dimensions are conceptually correlated parenting behaviors within the broader construct of verbal feedback, an oblique rotation method—specifically Direct Oblimin—was utilized. Oblique rotation permits latent factors to correlate naturally, reflecting real-world parenting practices where caregivers typically combine different forms of positive feedback.

Model Refinement and Item Retention

In the initial 17-item extraction, the three-factor model accounted for 50% of the total variance across the instrument. However, item inspection revealed that four items exhibited psychometric deficiencies, such as cross-loadings across multiple dimensions or low communalities (< .30). These four problematic items were systematically removed. The subsequent re-analysis of the refined 13-item instrument demonstrated a marked improvement in psychometric structure:

• The refined 13-item three-factor model accounted for 57% of the total cumulative variance.
• Each retained item loaded cleanly onto its designated conceptual factor (Process, Person, or Product praise), confirming the structural validity of the tripartite model.

Instrument / Measurement Tool

• Test Name: Scale of Praise Given by Primary Caregivers to Infants (Escala de Elogios Otorgados por Cuidadores Primarios a Infantes).
• Original Language: Spanish (Argentine adaptation).
• Test Type: Original self-report inventory / psychometric questionnaire.
• Format: Standardized rating scale administered electronically or via paper-and-pencil.
• Target Population: Primary caregivers (mothers, fathers, legal guardians) of infants and toddlers aged 0 to 36 months (0–3 years).
• Respondent Age Range: Adolescents (13–17 years) through Adulthood (Young Adulthood 18–29, Thirties 30–39, Middle Age 40–64 years).
• Number of Items: 13 items.
• Factor Structure / Subscales:
  • Process Praise (Elogio al proceso): Items assessing feedback directed at effort, strategy, and perseverance.
  • Person Praise (Elogio a la persona): Items assessing feedback directed at innate traits, intelligence, and stable traits.
  • Product Praise (Elogio al producto): Items assessing feedback directed at the final outcome, artifact, or task completion.
• Response Scale: 5-point Likert scale with options ranging from 1 (Never) to 5 (Very often).
• Administration Instructions: “Answer how often you use these phrases with your child when doing an activity, imagine the phrases referring to something you usually do, such as For example, a drawing, dancing, an art, writing, reading, a sport or learning something new.”
• Scoring Procedures: There are no reverse-coded items. Subscale scores are obtained by calculating the sum or mean of the items comprising each specific dimension. Higher scores denote a higher frequency of administering that specific form of praise during early caregiver-infant interactions.

Permissions & Fee and Test Year

• Publication Year: 2023.
• Original Publication: Interdisciplinaria Revista de Psicología y Ciencias Afines, 40(1), 147–157.
• Commercial Use: The scale is not intended for commercial exploitation.
• Fee: There is no fee required to use this instrument for scientific, educational, or clinical research purposes.
• Permissions & Correspondence: Interested researchers should contact the primary corresponding author for formal authorization and usage guidelines:
  • Natalia A. Mancini, Ph.D. — Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas (CONICET), Argentina. Email: [email protected]

References

• Brummelman, E., Thomaes, S., Overbeek, G., Orobio de Castro, B., van den Hout, M. A., & Bushman, B. J. (2014). On breeding narcissists: Children’s internalize others’ inflated views of them. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 112(12), 3659–3662. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1420870112
• Dweck, C. S. (2006). Mindset: The new psychology of success. Random House.
• Gunderson, E. A., Gripshover, S. J., Romero, C., Dweck, C. S., Goldin-Meadow, S., & Levine, S. C. (2013). Parent praise to 1- to 3-year-olds predicts children’s motivation stemming from effort 5 years later. Child Development, 84(5), 1526–1541. https://doi.org/10.1111/cdev.12064
• Gunderson, E. A., Sorhagen, N. S., Gripshover, S. J., Dweck, C. S., Goldin-Meadow, S., & Levine, S. C. (2018). Parent praise to toddlers predicts fourth grade academic achievement via children’s incremental mindsets. Developmental Psychology, 54(3), 397–409. https://doi.org/10.1037/dev0000444
• Kelley, S. A., Brownell, C. A., & Campbell, S. B. (2000). Mastery behaviors and evaluative feedback: Early parental coparticipation and children’s responses to challenge. Developmental Psychology, 36(6), 729–740. https://doi.org/10.1037/0012-1649.36.6.729
• Lucca, K., Horton, R., & Sommerville, J. A. (2019). Keep at it! Infants’ sensitivity to praise and encouragement during problem solving. Frontiers in Psychology, 10, Article 972. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.00972
• Mancini, N. A., Schetsche, C., Morales, L. J., Simaes, A. C., & Gago Galvano, L. G. (2023). Construcción de una escala para evaluar tipos de elogios otorgados por cuidadores primarios a infantes de 0 a 3 años [Construction of a scale to assess the types of praise given by primary caregivers to infants 0-3 years]. Interdisciplinaria Revista de Psicología y Ciencias Afines, 40(1), 147–157. https://doi.org/10.16888/interd.2023.40.1.9
• Mueller, C. M., & Dweck, C. S. (1998). Praise for intelligence can undermine children’s motivation and performance. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 75(1), 33–53. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.75.1.33
• Weiner, B. (1985). An attributional theory of achievement motivation and emotion. Psychological Review, 92(4), 548–573. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-295X.92.4.548

Items of the Scale