The purpose of this experiment was to examine the relationship between inconsistent verbal instructions and children´s resistance-to-temptation behavior. Sixty-four subjects were ranaorm drawn from the second grade of one primary school. All were divided into interpersonal-and intrapersonal-instruction groups, according to treatment conditions, each group was further divided into four subgroups: consistent prohibitive, inconsistent (permissive first), inconsistent (prohibitive first) and consistent permissive group. The subject´s toy-touching responses were analyzed by latency, frequency, duration score and average duration score. The results of the study indicated that: (1) there were no significant group differences in manipulative responses between the interpersonal-and the intrapersonal-verbal-instruction groups. (2) two groups´ children who had received inconsistent instructions had more toy-touching responses and shorter latency than the consistently prohibitive group but less toy-touching responses and longer latency than the consistently permissive group. All above-mentioned differences were statistically significant. (3) with regard to the means of latency, frequency, duration score and average duration score, there were no significant differences between the two inconsistent group.
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