Perceptual and Motor Skills, 2012, 114, 3, 883-902. © Perceptual and Motor Skills 2012 DOI 10.2466/02.09.15.21.PMS.114.3.883-902 ISSN 0031-5125 THE BEARS FAMILY PROJECTIVE TEST: EVALUATING STORIES OF CHILDREN WITH EMOTIONAL DIFFICULTIES 1, 2 GIUSEPPE IANDOLO Department of Developmental and Educational Psychology Autonomous University of Madrid, Spain GIANLUCA ESPOSITO Kuroda Research Unit RIKEN Brain Science Institute, Saitama, Japan Department of Cognitive Science and Education University of Trento, Italy PAOLA VENUTI Department of Cognitive Science and Education, University of Trento, Italy Summary.—The aim of this study was to describe and analyze the storytelling of children with emotional difculties. Forty children with emotional and relational difculties (inhibited and impulsive), ages between 5.5 and 9.4 years old, were as- sessed by a multiaxial procedure and the Bears Family Projective Test. The Bears Family Test is a constructive-thematic-projective method based on an anthropo- morphic family of bears that children can manipulate to tell a story. The stories of 40 children without emotional difculties (matched by IQ, socio-economic status, and gender) and 322 typically developing children, aged between four and 10 years old, were used as a reference for comparisons. Results indicated that the stories of children with emotional difculties showed many unsolved problematic events, unclear characters, negative relationships, and negative behaviors. Unlike the sto- ries of children without emotional difculties, positive contents didn’t prevail over negative, and there wasn’t a positive compensation for negative elements. Storytelling is a complex human function, a form of language that starts developing in children between two and three years old, when the child begins to use it as a new form of communication linked to the autobi- ographical self (Nelson, 1993). Children’s narrative competence develops with age and is based on language development (Botvin & Sutton-Smith, 1977; Applebee, 1978; Bruner, 1986; Nelson, 1996), conceptual reasoning (Piaget, 1955; Bruner, 1990), patterns of episodic-semantic memory (Nel- son, 1981; Tulving, 1983, 2002; Mandler, 1984), relational models (Bowlby, 1969; Laible, Carlo, Torquati, &Ontai, 2004; Mayseless, 2005; Moss, Bu- reau, Béliveau, Zbedik, & Lépine, 2009), and socio-cultural stimulation (Vygotsky, 1934; Winnicott, 1965; Feldmann, 1994; Baddeley 1997). According to diferent authors, all cognitive processes (such as deci- sion making, episodic memory, and storytelling) are infuenced by emo- tions (Dodge, 1991; Greenspan, 1997; Siegel, 1999; Bechara & Damasio, 1 Address correspondence to Gianluca Esposito, 2-1 Hirosawa, Wako-Shi, Saitama 351-0198 Japan or e-mail (gesposito@brain.riken.jp). 2 Gratitude is expressed to Roger Bakeman (Georgia State University) for reading and commenting on the paper. This research was partially supported from the Intramural Research Program of the DiSCoF, University of Trento, Italy.