A Longitudinal Study of Belief and Desire State Discourse During Mother–Child Play and Later False Belief Understanding

There is considerable interest in the role of mental state language in theory of mind development. This study examines cognitive and desire state discourse of 43 mothers during play interactions with their two‐year‐old children and theory of mind as indicated by a battery of false belief tasks around the age of five. Desire state comments of mothers during free play which were appropriate to the conversational context were significantly related to children's later theory of mind, and this relation was independent of other confounding variables, including a home‐based measure of maternal sensitivity, and socio‐economic status, and an estimate of child language. The child's desire state language was concurrently related to the mother's desire state language used appropriately, and the child's cognitive state language was related to the mother's appropriate cognitive state language. Although cognitive state language was not predictive of later theory of mind, this may be because this kind of language plays a later role in theory of mind development.     

Maternal depression and children’s false belief understanding

Children of depressed mothers show substantial social impairment, which increases their risk for developing depression. Theory of mind understanding forms the basis of social functioning, and is impaired in children of currently depressed mothers. Models of risk emphasize that a history of any maternal depression confers risk to later psychopathology. Therefore, we tested a novel model of the impact of lifetime maternal depression on children’s false belief understanding that accounts for three primary factors that scaffold this understanding: maternal mental state talk, and children’s executive functioning and language abilities. Children aged 41–48 months with a maternal lifetime history of major depressive disorder (MDD; n = 19) performed significantly more poorly on the false belief battery compared to those without (n = 44). Further, lower levels of mental state talk, child executive functioning, and child language ability were significantly associated with poorer false belief scores. However, the relation between maternal MDD and children’s false belief performance was not mediated by any of these factors. These results indicate that maternal depression predicts poorer false belief understanding independently of other crucial scaffolding variables, and may be a social cognitive mechanism underlying the intergenerational transmission of depression.     

Early socialization of hostile attribution bias: The roles of parental attributions,parental discipline,and child attributes

The goal of this study was to examine child and parent predictors of children's hostile attribution bias (HAB) with a particular focus on exploring the associations between parents’ early attribution of child misbehavior and children's HAB in the transition to school age. Participants were 241 children (118 girls) of middle‐income families who were at risk for school‐age conduct problems. Multi‐method, multi‐informant data were collected on maternal attributions of child misbehavior, parental use of corporal punishment, and child attributes (i.e., verbal IQ, effortful control, theory of mind, and emotional understanding) at 3 years, and child HAB in ambiguous situations at 6 years. Results indicated that mothers’ internal explanations for children's misconduct may either reduce or increase children's later HAB depending on the specific content of attributions, such that mothers’ belief that children misbehave because of their internal state (i.e., emotional state or temperament) was associated with lower levels of child HAB, whereas attributing power‐based motives (i.e., manipulative, controlling intentions) in children was associated with higher levels of HAB. The findings are discussed with respect to appreciating the complexity of parents’ explanations for children's behavior, and considering parental cognition as a potential target for early identification and prevention of child HAB and related problems.     

The contribution of emotion knowledge,language ability,and maternal emotion socialization style to explaining toddlers’ emotion regulation

In this study, we set out to advance understanding of the association between emotion knowledge (EK) and emotion regulation (ER) in toddlerhood, by innovatively examining a model that simultaneously takes into account both individual factors, such as age, gender, and language ability, and contextual factors, such as maternal emotion socialization styles (coaching vs. dismissing). Participants were 242 toddlers (141 girls; M_age = 28.79 months, SD = 3.48) and their mothers (M_age = 35.60 years; SD = 4.95). We evaluated children’s language ability and ER via parent‐report questionnaires, assessing their EK via a direct measure individually administered at the nursery. The mothers also completed a questionnaire on their own emotion socialization style. Children’s EK was positively correlated with their ER skills as reported by their parents. Structural equation modeling showed that emotion‐dismissing maternal behaviors were significantly negatively associated with toddlers’ emotional competencies whereas maternal emotion‐coaching styles were significantly positively associated with higher levels of these competences. Finally, language ability was positively associated with ER. We discuss the theoretical and educational implications of these outcomes, as well as potential new lines of inquiry.     

Parents' beliefs about children's emotions,children's emotion understanding,and classroom adjustment in middle childhood

To explore how parental socialization of emotion may influence children's emotion understanding, which then guides children's interpretations of emotion‐related situations across contexts, we examined the pathways between socialization of emotion and children's adjustment in the classroom, with children's emotion understanding as an intervening variable. Specifically, children's emotion understanding was examined as a mediator of associations between mothers' beliefs about the value and danger of children's emotions and children's adjustment in the classroom within an SEM framework. Classroom adjustment was estimated as a latent variable and included social, emotional, and behavioral indices. Covariates included maternal education, and child gender and ethnicity. Participants were a diverse group of 201 third‐graders (116 African American, 81 European American, 4 Biracial; 48.8% female), their mothers, and teachers. Results revealed that emotion‐related beliefs (value and danger) had no direct influence on classroom adjustment. However, children whose mothers endorsed the belief that emotions are dangerous demonstrated less emotion understanding and were less well‐adjusted in the classroom. Mothers' belief that emotions are valuable was not independently associated with emotion understanding. Findings point to the important role of emotion understanding in children's development across contexts (family, classroom) and developmental domains (social, emotional, behavioral) during the middle childhood years.     

Mothers' and Fathers' Use of Internal State Talk with their Young Children

The present study extends previous results demonstrating a relation between maternal discourse and child social understanding to include paternal discourse. Emotion understanding (EU) and theory of mind (ToM) were considered as two distinctive aspects of social understanding. Participants were 106 children (54 boys and 52 girls) studied at 3.5 and 5 years. Discourse measures came from separate parent–child conversations during a picture‐book task; measures of EU and ToM came from children's performance on social cognition tasks. Differences in parental talk translated into important differences in the influence of each parent on children's social‐cognitive understanding. Mothers' references to emotion and emotion causal explanatory language predicted children's concurrent EU. Fathers' use of causal explanatory language referring to desires and emotions predicted children's concurrent and later ToM. These results highlight important differences between mothers and fathers in their use of internal state language and its impact on children's social‐cognitive understanding.     

Mother–Child Conversations about Emotions: Linkages to Child Aggression and Prosocial Behavior

We examined associations of maternal and child emotional discourse and child emotion knowledge with children's behavioral competence. Eighty‐five upper middle‐income, mostly White preschoolers and mothers completed a home‐based bookreading task to assess discourse about emotions. Children's anger perception bias and emotion situation knowledge were assessed in a separate interview. Children's prosocial behavior, relational aggression, and physical aggression were observed during a preschool‐based triadic play task. Mothers' emotion explanations were correlated with children's emotion situation knowledge and relational aggression. Both mothers' and children's emotion explanations predicted prosocial behavior whereas mothers' use of positive emotional themes was negatively associated with children's anger perception bias. Physical aggression was predicted by mothers' emotion comments, children's anger perception bias, and lack of emotion situation knowledge. Maternal emotion socialization variables were less strongly related to children's behavioral competence after accounting for demographics and child emotional competence. Implications of these findings for future research on emotion socialization are discussed.     

The Use of Emotion Explanations by Mothers: Relation to Preschoolers' Gender and Understanding of Emotions

Mothers’ emotion talk, children's emotion talk, and children's understanding of emotion were examined in 50 mother–child dyads at 41 months. Language measures included total emotion words, unique emotion words, labels, explanations, and different types of explanations. Children's emotion understanding was assessed for labeling, situation, and role‐taking knowledge, as well as an overall score. There were different patterns of relations between mothers’ emotion talk and boys’ and girls’ emotion talk, with mothers’ emotion talk related more strongly to boys’ emotion talk. Mothers’ emotion talk for boys and girls was differentially related to the subparts of the emotion understanding test. Specifically, mothers’ total emotion talk predicted boys’ performance on the situation knowledge test and their use of causal emotion explanations predicted boys’ overall score, but none of the maternal variables predicted girls’ performance. This finding may result from differences in variability of maternal speech to boys’ and girls’, and it may be due to differences in maternal speech in earlier years.     

How Parenting Style Affects False Belief Understanding

This study investigated whether mothers facilitate false belief understanding, and if so, what strategies are particularly relevant. The mothers of 64 3- and 4-year-olds were given questionnaires eliciting information about mother's education, mother's occupation, number of younger and older siblings, the time the child spends with mother, and about how mothers deal with five disciplinary situations with their child. Three variables were positively correlated with belief understanding: age, number of older siblings, and number of times mothers said they would respond to the disciplinary situations by asking the child to reflect on the victim's feelings (How Feel responses). These three variables had an independent effect on belief understanding because each was significant after accounting for the influence due to the other two variables. In contrast, there was no significant positive relation between belief understanding and mothers who engaged their child in general discussion and exploration of the disciplinary issues, or who simply reprimanded the child without discussing the situation. The effects for number of older siblings and How Feel responses remained even after the influence due to the child's age, verbal mental age, time spent with the mother, and number of younger siblings was accounted for. The results are consistent with recent research showing that parent-child relations may be important for theory of mind understanding. More importantly, they provide insight into a specific strategy by which parents may help children learn about mental states.     

Concurrent associations between mothers’ references to internal states and children’s social understanding in middle childhood

Although it is well established that features of maternal speech are associated with children’s social understanding in the preschool years, few studies explore this relationship in middle childhood. Within the context of a prospective longitudinal study of a representative community sample of families (subsample n = 207, mean age = 82.88 months), we investigated concurrent associations between mothers’ internal state language and aspects of 7‐year‐olds’ social understanding, including children’s understanding of belief and spontaneous references to internal states during free play. When sociodemographic, maternal, and child characteristics were controlled, mothers’ references to their own cognitions were associated with dimensions of children’s social understanding. Our findings suggest that exposure to others’ perspectives contributes to children’s advanced understanding of minds, which has implications for interventions that foster social understanding.     

Theory of Mind, Self-worth and the Mother–Child Relationship

We tested the hypothesis that mother–child warmth and responsiveness would moderate the link between young children's theory of mind skills and self‐worth. Participants included 125 same‐sex pairs of 3.5 year‐old twins and their mothers. A battery of tests was individually administered to measure the children's theory of mind skills and verbal intelligence, and their self‐reported self‐worth was assessed using a puppet interview. Following visits to the families' homes, the observers completed ratings of warm responsive mother–child behavior based on videotaped unstructured and structured observations. As expected, warm responsive behavior moderated the relation between their theory of mind and the child's self‐worth. Their theory of mind was positively associated with self‐worth in warm responsive mother–child dyads, and there was weaker evidence that their theory of mind may be negatively associated with self‐worth in less warm, unresponsive mother–child dyads.     

A Longitudinal Study of Mother-Child Relationships and Theory of Mind in the Preschool Period

To investigate individual differences in theory of mind acquisition, this study examined whether different aspects of early mother-child relationships contributed to the development of false belief understanding at the close of the preschool period. Forty-six mother and child pairs were seen when children were two and again at five years of age. At age two, home-based Q-sort observations of attachment security and maternal sensitivity were made, and mothers completed a number of self-report measures to create an aggregate of maternal emotional distress. At age five, attachment security and maternal distress were reassessed, and false belief tasks were administered that were based on unexpected identities and locations of objects. In addition, attachment-relevant false belief tasks involving separation from caregivers were also used, which children found significantly more difficult than tasks involving objects. Age five security predicted object location task performance. Maternal sensitivity and emotional distress at age two predicted later caregiver location task performance, even controlling for age five measures. These results support a growing literature on the importance of relationship processes and parenting context to theory of mind acquisition.     

The Role of Child Emotional Responsiveness and Maternal Negative Emotion Expression in Children's Coping Strategy Use

This study examined the additive and interactive effects of children's trait vicarious emotional responsiveness and maternal negative emotion expression on children's use of coping strategies. Ninety‐five children (mean age = 5.87 years) and their mothers and teachers participated in the study. The mothers reported on their own negative emotion expression and the children's empathic concern and personal distress tendencies. The mothers and teachers reported on the children's use of avoidant, support‐seeking, and aggressive‐venting coping strategies. Empathic concern was positively associated with the children's use of support seeking and negatively associated with the children's use of aggressive venting, whereas personal distress showed the opposite pattern of associations. Maternal negative emotion expression moderated some associations between the children's emotional responsiveness and coping. These findings support the hypothesis that children's tendencies to experience empathic concern or personal distress indicate functionally distinct styles of emotional arousal that may have broader consequences for socially competent behavior in response to normative stressors.     

Children's Theory of Mind: Understanding of Desire, Belief and Emotion with Social Referents

Preschooler's understanding of belief, desire, and emotion was assessed in a new false belief task that explored childen's mental state reasoning about social situations. The social analog task presented a change in a partner's play activity rather than a change in the location of a physical object. Two main differences from the usual pattern of theory of mind results were obtained. Five-year-olds had more difficulty understanding a false belief about another's current social activity compared to a false belief about a physical situation. The understanding of desire exhibited a 3- to 5-year age change that may have been shown because the social situation involved conflicting desires. When there was a conflict, the younger children tended to disregard the stated desire and exhibited 'social opportunism' by misattributing desires to permit a social interaction. The new results give a more varied picture of the development of theory of mind, and argue for expanding its study into social frames of reference.     

Emotion understanding and maternal sensitivity as protective factors against hostile attribution bias in anger‐prone children

The present research examined children’s anger proneness, emotion understanding, and maternal sensitivity during toddlerhood as predictors of children’s hostile attribution bias (HAB) during the later preschool years. At 2.8 years (N = 128), maternal sensitivity (e.g., child‐centered behavior) was observed during mother–child play and snack, and parents reported on children’s anger proneness. At 3.3 years, emotion understanding (i.e., ability to identify emotional expressions accurately) was measured via an interactive puppet interview. At 4.8 and 5.4 years, children's HAB was assessed via child responses to hypothetical vignettes of ambiguous peer provocations. Path models revealed that maternal sensitivity predicted fewer hostile attributions. In addition, emotion understanding and maternal sensitivity emerged as buffers against the negative effect of anger proneness on HAB. Specifically, greater anger proneness was associated with more frequent hostile attributions, but only when children had lower emotion understanding or had mothers who were less sensitive. The findings highlight the interplay between intrapersonal and interpersonal factors in early childhood that contribute to a hostile attribution bias during the preschool period.     

Attachment, Parent–Child Discourse and Theory-of-Mind Development

This study investigated the relations among attachment, mother–child discourse, and theory of mind in a sample of 76 four‐year‐old children (mean age = 4.48 years; 36 boys). Mother–child conversations about a past event were coded for maternal use of elaborative discourse and mothers' references to mental states. Mothers completed the attachment q‐sort and children completed four false‐belief tasks. Results revealed that maternal conversational elaboration was a significant predictor of children's theory‐of‐mind performance, whereas maternal mental state references and attachment security were not. The findings provide further evidence for the importance of discourse in children's theory‐of‐mind development.     

Mothers' Representations of Relationships with their Children: Relations with Parenting Behavior, Mother Characteristics, and Child Disability Status

Representational models of mother-child relationships were assessed through interview for 112 mothers of children ages 14 to 52 months. Fifty-eight (51.8%) children had a diagnosis of cerebral palsy, 19 (17%) were diagnosed with epilepsy, while the remaining 35 (31.3%) had no diagnosis. Relations were examined between dimensions of representations (compliance, achievement, secure base, enmeshment, worry, pain) and maternal age, education and stress; diagnostic group and child developmental status; and mother's behavior with the child in a problem-solving task. Mothers for whom boundary violations were represented were also less focused with child achievement and experienced more worry and pain in the relationship. More severe disability status was associated with less compliance and more pain in representations. Longer time since diagnosis was positively correlated with painful representations. Representations were unrelated to child gender, child age, maternal education or age, or parenting stress. With educational level controlled, mothers' support for the child and positive affect in a problem-solving task were negatively related to representations of worry about the child's future. Boundary concerns were predictive of mothers' pressuring behavior in the problem-solving task. Findings suggest representations are related to caregiving behavior apart from other maternal characteristics, and that mothers' representations reflect variability in their children.     

Children's Social Representations in Dolls' House Play and Theory of Mind Tasks, and their Relation to Family Adversity and Child Disturbance

Five-year-old children of depressed and well mothers were assessed on theory of mind tasks, and enacted scenes from their family lives in dolls' house play. Performance on theory of mind tasks was only weakly related to family circumstances and child distur-bance, but was significantly associated with measures of the child's general and verbal intelligence. In contrast, children's social representations elicited during dolls' house play showed systematic relationships with family adversity (maternal depression and parental conflict) in interaction with the child's gender: girls exposed to difficulties depicted particularly harmonious mother-child relationships, and their accounts showed a high degree of narrative structure; while boys so exposed depicted poor parenting, and their accounts were relatively incoherent. The children's dolls' house play was also associated with several aspects of their wider experience, including objective assessments of mother-child interactions, and behavioural and emotional adjustment in school. This technique may usefully elucidate the basis of child behavioural problems and psychopathology in the context of disturbed family relationships, and provide a route for therapeutic intervention.     

Understanding Others, and Individual Differences in Friendship Interactions in Young Children

Links between individual differences in 4-year-olds' social understanding, language abilities, temperament, behavioral adjustment and family background and the quality of their interaction with a close friend were investigated. 64 pairs of friends were filmed playing together on two occasions, and each child tested on a battery of assessments of theory of mind, emotion understanding and language. Teachers and mothers reported on children's adjustment and temperament respectively. There were marked differences in children's interactions with their friends; the sociocognitive abilities and behavioral characteristics of both child and friend contributed significantly to cooperative shared pretend, to low frequency of conflict and to successful communication between friends; behavioral adjustment and family background also contributed independently to friendship quality. The similarity between friends in behavioral adjustment and sociolinguistic skills was notable.