Theory of Mind Development in Children PDF

Advanced Developmental Psychology Theory of Mind Theory of Mind and Social Development - Handout Definition “theory of mind”: “The ability to understand and take into account another individual's mental state” Earlier view of theory of mind: - Interdependent set of mental concepts → Little attenti...

Advanced Developmental Psychology Theory of Mind Theory of Mind and Social Development - Handout Definition “theory of mind”: “The ability to understand and take into account another individual's mental state” Earlier view of theory of mind: - Interdependent set of mental concepts → Little attention to the social consequences of mental state concepts - Investigators set different focuses which lead to inconsistencies - Experimental investigators: Cognitive mechanisms, understanding of comprehension of representation - Ethological investigators: Social understanding, motivational states - There has never been a combination of experimental study and naturalistic observation of the same group - No empirical evidence relating a children’s understanding of a person’s false belief to their social understanding - The origin of the false belief understanding comes from social lives Presented study: - Aim: Look for a correlation between the theory of mind development and children’s social interaction - Investigating: Possibility that children who have a good theory of mind interact differently with others than children who are the same age and have the same linguistic competence but not a as good developed theory of mind Hypothesis: 1. Children with a more developed theory of mind would better understand their peers’ emotional reactions and would show more empathetic concern towards them 2. High levels of engagement in pretend play would be related to false belief understanding 3. Children with a more developed understanding of false belief would be more aware that their own beliefs about the pretend world may not match with the beliefs of their playmates → need of making own version more explicit Advanced Developmental Psychology Theory of Mind Method: - The study included 30 children between the ages of 3 and 6. - Three different assessments were administered: a language ability test, a false belief test, and an empathic concern measure. - Pretend play was videotaped and observed to measure the amount of pretend play. - The false belief test consisted of four tasks that assessed the children's understanding of false beliefs. - Empathic concern was measured by having the children nominate three children who were kind when others got upset. Aim of this study: - Examine whether children who show greater false belief understanding on the basis of experimental tasks demonstrate different sorts of (social) competencies in naturalistic settings than children who show less false belief understanding Ruling out confounds - The average level of false belief understanding in the group was not a significant influence on the children’s behavior - Child’s sex was not significantly associated with any variables and was not entered in any subsequent analyses - Given that 95% of control questions were passed the type of task was not entered as a covariate in any analyses - The intercorrelation between these different tasks was found to be sufficiently strong for us to argue that some common underlying skill is being measured. - When the four tasks were summed the internal consistency of the measure is high (a = 0.85) Results: Pearson Correlations of TOM and all variables Advanced Developmental Psychology Theory of Mind - The study only produces correlational results, hence, all associations are non-directional. - The older children are, the greater their ability to attribute mental states to oneself and others, and to understand that these mental states can influence behavior. - Next, we see that language ability is significantly and positively correlated with false belief understanding and age. - This means that children with greater verbal ability tend to be older and have a further developed theory of mind. - The empathic rating of concern towards other children and the amount of pretend play were not associated with false belief understanding. - However, children with a further developed theory of mind made more joint proposals and made more role assignments (medium positive correlation) Empathy and Pretend Play after partialling out Age and Language ability - Table 3 shows the correlations among Empathic Concern, Amount of Pretend Play, Joint Proposals, and Role Assignment, with False Belief Understanding when controlling for age and language ability - False belief understanding remained significantly associated with children’s joint proposals and role assignments after taking account of the effect of age, and also after taking account of the effect of age and language ability. - The greater the children’s understanding of false belief the greater their generation of joint proposals and the greater the frequency with which they explicitly assign roles in pretend play interaction → Making joint proposals and role assignments as measures of pretend play are the main effects independent of age and linguistic ability. Advanced Developmental Psychology Theory of Mind Study findings: - Children who showed higher levels of false belief understanding were more likely to make joint proposals in their pretend play and assign explicit pretend roles to themselves and other children with greater frequency. - This relationship was not accounted for by the children's age or language ability, suggesting that false belief understanding is associated with certain real-world behaviors in children. - The study didn’t find an association between false belief understanding and the amount of pretend play a child was involved in. - No association between false belief understanding and empathic concern as measured by peer nominations → There may not be a direct relationship between cognitive and affective measures. There are two domains of social understanding — understanding beliefs — — understanding emotions — - They’re not significantly correlated with one another at 40 months of age, and they have different patterns of correlates later on. - Different kinds of explanation might be needed for different aspects of theory of mind development. "it is important that we should not think of ' socio-emotional understanding' as an undifferentiated whole, but examine separately children's growing sophistication in different realms" - Astington Limitations of the study - The children's pretend play was observed on only one occasion for a period of about ten minutes - Which may not be enough time to capture the full range of their pretend play behavior. - The study does not establish causality due to its cross-sectional nature. - The study's cross-sectional nature means that it is not possible to confirm a causal pathway between false belief understanding and real-world behavior therefore further research is needed to explore this relationship. Advanced Developmental Psychology Theory of Mind Future research - The study was designed and data analyzed around the premise that false belief understanding would have consequences for children's ability to interact with others. But they were unable to confirm a causal pathway between false belief understanding and the ability to interact with others and the quality of pretend play. - It suggests that false belief understanding may have implications for cognitive and social development in young children. Further research could be done to determine the causal relationship between false belief understanding and children's ability to interact with others and the quality of their pretend play. - A longitudinal study could be conducted to determine whether acquiring a more advanced understanding of false beliefs leads to the ability to generate joint plans and make explicit role assignments. - As there wasn't an association between false belief understanding and empathic concern so future research could investigate this relationship further, using alternative measures to determine the level of children's concern for others. Literatur: Janet Wilde Astington & Jennifer M. Jenkins (1995) Theory of mind development and social understanding, Cognition & Emotion, 9:2-3, 151-165, DOI: 10.1080/02699939508409006