Beach balls: Assessing frustration tolerance in young children using a computerized task

Abstract

Frustration tolerance is a skill related to emotional regulation processes and is important insofar as it affects people's social relationships and even health. Low levels of frustration tolerance in children have been associated with a greater number of externalizing symptoms such as aggression or anger. Despite its importance, there are a limited number of tasks that attempt to evaluate this construct objectively. Therefore, the aim of our work was the design of a computerized task, programmed as a videogame in order to assess frustration tolerance in children from 6 to 10 years old. The results obtained showed that the test had a good internal consistency and could be useful as an objective measure of frustration tolerance in children. In line with the literature, our data have shown no influence of gender or laterality of participants during the task and only 7% of the frustration measure could be explained by the influence of participants' age. On the other hand, the performance of the participants during the task has allowed us to classify them into six groups according to their performance, namely Low/High Frustration, Low/High Performance and Low/High Reaction Time. This test would permit to compare participants' performance with their reference group but also with their own results, facilitating the obtention of an objective assessment of frustration tolerance in young children.