The Relationship Between Psychological Understanding and Positive Social Behaviors

This research investigates the relationship between psychological understanding and positive social behavior in preschool children. A sample of 67 children were given measures of mental state understanding and emotion understanding. Positive social behavior was measured by classroom observation, teacher report and peer ratings. Both mental state understanding and emotion understanding were positively related to teacher ratings of social skills, behavioral observers’ global ratings of social skills and peer popularity. When language ability was partialled out of these relationships, many of the significant correlations disappeared; however, for variables related to peers’ perceptions, psychological understanding continued to predict unique variance. The results are discussed in terms of the multiple determinacy of positive social behaviors and the potential role of language in these processes.     

Exploring the Bidirectionality of Emotion Understanding and Classroom Behavior with Spanish‐ and English‐speaking Preschoolers Attending Head Start

The present study investigated time‐dependent relationships between emotion understanding and the behavioral adjustment of preschoolers over a single school year using a latent variable structural equation modeling framework. Teacher reports of child behavior (hyperactivity, emotion symptoms, conduct problems, peer problems, and prosocial behavior) and performance assessments of emotion understanding were obtained twice at a 6‐month interval for a sample of 281 preschoolers (159 boys and 122 girls, with mean age = 52.40 months) from English‐ (N = 158) and Spanish‐speaking (N = 123) backgrounds. Emotion understanding and behavior were stable over time, and cross‐sectional associations between them were in expected directions. Cross‐lagged paths revealed that the behavior variables significantly associated with emotion understanding across time were hyperactivity, emotion symptoms, and peer problems, and that behavior variables were generally better predictors of emotion understanding than vice versa. Differences across gender and language groups suggest a stronger and more complex bidirectional relationship between emotion understanding and behavior for girls and for Spanish‐speaking children compared wth boys and English‐speaking children. Results are discussed with respect to the value of exploring cross‐lagged relationships and the potential importance of gender and culture as determinants of those relationships.     

The relation between parents' mental state talk and children's social understanding: A meta‐analysis

Though there is empirical support for the relation between parents' mental state talk to children and children's social understanding, including false belief understanding (FBU) and emotion understanding (EU), effect sizes range widely. The current meta‐analysis focused on the relation between parents' mental state talk and children's social understanding and moderators of this relation: parents' mental state talk content (e.g., cognitive vs. emotion talk), quality (e.g., appropriate vs. inappropriate), and context (e.g., book vs. reminiscing). Data from 22 studies examining FBU and 18 examining EU were examined. Participants included 2,298 children (<7 years). Analyses yielded a significant effect size for parents' mental state talk and children's FBU and EU. These relations were stronger under certain circumstances, particularly for children's FBU. For example, in terms of content, cognitive state talk was a stronger predictor of FBU and EU compared to talk about desires and emotions. For FBU, the strongest relations were present when parents' mental state talk was: (a) appropriate and explanatory compared to inappropriate and (b) in a book or self‐report context compared to reminiscing. The results of this study further refine the social constructivist view of social understanding and point to future avenues for research aimed at improving children's social understanding.     

Differentiating Processes of Control and Understanding in the Early Development of Emotion and Cognition

In this study, we examined the hypothesis that preschoolers' performance on emotion and cognitive tasks is organized into discrete processes of control and understanding within the domains of emotion and cognition. Additionally, we examined the relations among component processes using mother report, behavioral observation, and physiological measures of emotion control. Participants were 263 children (42 percent non‐White) and their mothers. Results indicated that the three approaches of measuring emotion control were unrelated. Regardless of the measurement method, a four‐factor solution differentiating emotion control and understanding and cognitive control and understanding fits the data better than did either of two two‐factor models, one based on domains of emotion and cognition across processes, and one based on processes of control and understanding across domains. Results of this research replicate those of Leerkes et al. in describing a differentiated underlying structure of emotion and cognition processes in early childhood while also extending these conclusions across samples and across measurement approaches for assessing emotion control.     

Aggression in toddlerhood: The roles of parental beliefs,parenting behavior and precursors of theory of mind

Parental beliefs, parenting behavior, and precursors of theory of mind have been related uniquely to each other and to early aggression, but have not yet been studied simultaneously. The present study combined these risk factors in the prediction of aggression during toddlerhood using a sample of 152 mother–child dyads. At 20 months, mothers' parental beliefs (parental self‐efficacy and perceived parental impact) were examined with the Parental Cognitions and Conduct Toward the Infant Scale. Maternal parenting behavior (sensitivity, intrusiveness, and successful positive engagement) was observed during free play and teaching tasks, and children's precursors of theory of mind were assessed using a visual perspectives task and an imitation task. At 30 months, child aggression was examined using the Child Behavior Checklist. A regression analysis indicated that lower parental self‐efficacy and lower imitation skills predicted more aggressive behavior. When estimating the indirect effects using bootstrapping, a final model was found indicating that lower perceived parental impact was related to less successful positive engagement, which, in turn, was associated with children's poorer imitation abilities which predicted more aggressive behavior. It can be concluded that aggression during toddlerhood is predicted significantly by interrelated parental beliefs, parenting behavior, and children's early social cognitive abilities.     

Parental communication about emotional contexts: Differences across discrete categories of emotion

Parent socialization of emotion is critical for children's emotional development. One mechanism through which parents socialize emotional understanding is in their conversations about emotions with their children. Previous research has investigated parent–child discourse about emotions differing by positive and negative valence. This study examined how parents communicated about and differentially emphasized elements of discrete emotion contexts (anger, sadness, disgust, fear, joy). Caregivers described images of emotional contexts to their 18‐month‐old or 24‐month‐old infant. Findings indicated that parents talked more about sadness images than joy images. Furthermore, parents mentioned the emoter more in anger and sadness contexts and talked about the referent more in disgust, fear, and joy contexts. Parents also posed more questions to female than male infants, particularly when discussing anger, sadness, and disgust images. No age differences were observed for any measure. These findings provide new insight into how parents talk about and highlight aspects of discrete emotional contexts.     

Paternal and Maternal Mind‐mindedness and Preschoolers' Theory of Mind: The Mediating Role of Interactional Attunement

The present investigation explored (1) fathers' contributions to children's theory of mind (ToM) development, (2) the similarity between maternal and paternal mind‐mindedness (MM) in relation to children's ToM, and (3) the relative predictive strength of two concurrently administered measures of MM (an online and an interview assessment) in relation to children's ToM. Thirty‐nine fathers, mothers, and their four‐year‐olds participated. Paternal MM was positively correlated with children's ToM performance. In addition, the two groups of parents performed similarly on both measures of MM. The findings also suggest that mothers and fathers who scored higher on the MM interview were more attuned to their children's mental processes during the online interaction measure of MM. The online measure of MM was found to mediate the relationship between the interview measure of MM and children's ToM for the maternal–child data only.     

Emotion Understanding in English- and Spanish-speaking Preschoolers Enrolled in Head Start

Research assessing children's emotion understanding has increased over the past several years. Despite the proliferation of research, there have been few studies conducted examining the development of emotion understanding in children from diverse backgrounds. Further, there has been no research conducted examining the psychometric properties of emotion understanding measures when used with children from diverse backgrounds. A total of 597 preschool children from low‐income families enrolled in Head Start (248 Spanish‐speaking and 349 English‐speaking) were given an emotion understanding assessment in their native language at two sessions separated by six months. All children showed significant growth in emotion understanding abilities from time 1 to time 2, with English‐speaking children generally outperforming Spanish‐speaking children. The psychometric performance of the measure was analyzed for both English and Spanish samples and for English‐speaking children at different levels of language ability.     

Preschoolers' Mind‐related Comments During Collaborative Problem‐solving: Parental Contributions and Developmental Outcomes

Preschool children's mind‐related comments were analyzed during collaborative problem‐solving interactions with mothers and fathers, and in relation to parental mind‐mindedness (MM) and children's concurrent theory of mind (ToM). Seventy‐two parents (36 fathers, 36 mothers) and their four‐year‐olds participated. Parents' comments to encourage independent thinking and children's own mind‐related comments were expected to mediate, in serial, the relationship between parental MM and children's ToM. The proposed model of mediation received empirical confirmation. In addition, mothers and fathers were found to perform similarly on two measures of MM and in their usage of autonomy promoting and control comments. Finally, no differences were found in the frequency of children's mind‐related comments during interactions with fathers and mothers.     

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.     

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' and Children's Positive Emotion: Relations and Trajectories across Four Years

The goals of this study were to examine the relations between and trajectories of mothers' and children's social positive expressivity (PE). Mothers' and children's PE were observed annually for four years beginning when children were approximately 18 months old (N = 247; 110 girls). Based on correlations, there was evidence of rank‐order stability in children's and mothers' PE. Based on growth curve analyses, mothers' and children's PE followed curvilinear trajectories; thus, mean‐level instability was found. Children's PE during a free‐play interaction with their mothers increased then decreased slightly whereas mothers' affect during the same task decreased then stabilized. Children's PE during a joy‐inducing situation (i.e., bubbles) with an experimenter slightly decreased and then increased. In panel models, there was no evidence of prediction over time across children's and mothers' PE when taking stability into account. These unique trajectories and relations provide insight into the developmental pattern of young children's and their mothers' PE elicited within social contexts.     

Different ways of knowing a child and their relations to mother‐reported autonomy support

We considered how different forms of child knowledge (i.e., mothers’ reports of taking their child's perspective, their accurate knowledge in the form of precise predictions of their child's ratings regarding distress/comforting and compliance/discipline situations, and their perceived knowledge) are differentially associated with mother‐reported autonomy support (i.e., providing meaningful rationales, providing choice, and acknowledging feelings; Koestner, Ryan, Bernieri, & Holt, 1984 ). Mothers and their children (141 dyads, M = 11 years old at Time 1) participated in a two‐wave longitudinal study with assessments made two years apart. The only form of knowledge that predicted changes in autonomy support was perspective‐taking. Autonomy support, in turn, indirectly predicted changes in distress/comforting accuracy through child‐reported self‐disclosure and directly predicted changes in perceived knowledge. These findings underline the importance of differentiating among forms of child knowledge in the study of socialization processes.     

False Belief and Emotion Understanding in Post-institutionalized Children

Deficits in social cognition may impair the ability to negotiate social transactions and relationships and contribute to socio emotional difficulties experienced by some post‐institutionalized children. We examined false belief and emotion understanding in 40 institutional care‐adopted children, 40 foster care‐adopted children and 40 birth children. Both groups of adopted children were adopted internationally. Controlling for verbal ability, post‐institutionalized children scored lower than birth children on a false belief task. Almost half of the post‐institutionalized children performed below chance levels. The foster care group did not differ from either group on false belief understanding. The groups did not differ on emotion understanding after controlling for verbal ability. The results suggest that some post‐institutionalized children are delayed in false belief understanding.     

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.     

Theory‐of‐mind during childhood: Investigating syntactic and executive contributions

Both syntax and Executive Functions (EF) are involved in Theory‐of‐Mind (ToM) but their contributory roles have mainly been studied separately. Moreover, researchers have mostly administered False Belief (FB) tasks while they may not be representative of all ToM abilities. Studies of adults give valuable information regarding whether syntax and EF are useful for ToM reasoning (i.e., Reasoning account), however, only the study of children brings direct evidence in favor of ToM emergence (i.e., Emergence account). Also, because the ToM tasks used often entail verbal and executive demands, the links observed could mostly result from such confounds (i.e., Expression account). We evaluated ToM, syntactic and EF abilities in 126 children (3‐11 y.o.) using a set of ToM tasks with minimal verbal and executive demands. Our goals were to assess (1) the hierarchical contribution of syntax and EF to ToM, (2) whether results previously obtained for FB tasks are representative of ToM in general, (3) whether the ToM‐syntax and ToM‐EF links are constant (i.e., Reasoning account) or decrease during development (i.e., Emergence accounts). Results of stepwise regression analyses showed a predominant role of syntax over EF to predict ToM abilities. The comparison of results for ToM and FB tasks showed that FB is not always representative of ToM. Finally, there was no moderating effect of age on the syntax‐ToM or EF‐ToM relations, thus suggestive of the Reasoning account rather than the Emergence account.     

Is there a Gender Difference in False Belief Development?

The contribution of children's social environment to their acquisition of theory of mind skills, combined with the well documented advantage for girls in mental state talk with siblings, peers and mothers, might lead to a female advantage on false belief tasks. We present a post‐hoc analysis of large datasets from two independent laboratories. A slight advantage for girls on false belief task performance was found in both datasets and was only apparent in younger but not older children. Language ability could be controlled for only in a smaller subsample of one dataset and cannot be ruled out as a potential mediator of this effect. However, if there is an age‐specific advantage for girls in false belief acquisition it is a weak effect only.     

Children's Attention to Others' Beliefs during Persuasion: Improvised and Selected Arguments to Puppets and People

Until now children's attention to the beliefs of people they wish to persuade has been examined experimentally via tasks that were artificial in important respects. To determine whether such research has underestimated children's psychological perspective taking, two studies that manipulated task elements pertinent to ecological validity were conducted. Children in three age groups (3, 4/5, and 6/7 years) were asked (forced‐choice and open‐ended formats) how best to persuade puppets and people, with differing beliefs, to pet and play with various toy animals. Children offered as many or more belief‐relevant arguments in response to forced‐choice as to open‐ended questions. Only the oldest group attended to beliefs more when persuading a person compared with a puppet. Even on more realistic tasks, significant improvement with age across task formats confirmed a developmental trajectory in line with extant reports of children's belief reasoning. The findings support the idea that enhanced social competence corresponds specifically to children's increasing attention to beliefs in social interactions such as persuasion.     

Teaching Three Year-Olds to Pass False Belief Tests: A Conversational Approach

A training procedure was developed for teaching three year-old children to pass a standard false belief task. A series of 4 video sequences was developed, in each of which a child showed surprise following the unexpected transfer of an object. A group of 23 three year-olds who failed a standard false belief task took part in 8 discussions of the 4 video clips, over a period of two weeks, and were compared with a control group of 23 task-failers who had 8 story reading sessions over the same time period. The training involved (a) interactive recall of the initial events in each sequence, (b) factual questioning about the events and (c) an explanation of the thoughts and actions of the video protagonists. The emphasis was on positive elaboration of children's answers rather than on negative feedback as counter evidence. The training group performed significantly better at an immediate post-test, and at a follow-up test two weeks later, on a similar as well as a generalisation task. Task success was unrelated to vocabulary (BPVS) score, but was significantly related to success of responses during the training. The results indicate learning in the Training group of a discursive format for talking about events useful for describing false beliefs.     

Social Factors in the Development of Autobiographical Memory: The State of the Art

This review addresses theory and research on the role of self understanding, language, theory of mind, attachment security, and parental style in children’s autobiographical memory development. Social‐cognitive factors appear to interact with parental style in producing children’s first verbal memories. Emotional factors, such as attachment security, may also prove to be critical for the socialization of life histories. Further longitudinal studies will be necessary to examine individual differences in the growth of this complex and multiply determined skill.