Children's utilization of emotion expectancies in moral decision‐making

This study investigated the relevance of emotion expectancies for children's moral decision‐making. The sample included 131 participants from three different grade levels (M = 8.39 years, SD = 2.45, range 4.58–12.42). Participants were presented a set of scenarios that described various emotional outcomes of (im)moral actions and asked to decide what they would do if they were in the protagonists' shoes. Overall, it was found that the anticipation of moral emotions predicted an increased likelihood of moral choices in antisocial and prosocial contexts. In younger children, anticipated moral emotions predicted moral choice for prosocial actions, but not for antisocial actions. Older children showed evidence for the utilization of anticipated emotions in both prosocial and antisocial behaviours. Moreover, for older children, the decision to act prosocially was less likely in the presence of non‐moral emotions. Findings suggest that the impact of emotion expectancies on children's moral decision‐making increases with age. Contrary to happy victimizer research, the study does not support the notion that young children use moral emotion expectancies for moral decision‐making in the context of antisocial actions.     

Theory of mind and mental state discourse during book reading and story‐telling tasks

This article presents three studies conducted in Canada and Australia that relate theory of mind (ToM) development to mental state discourse. In Study 1, mental state discourse was examined while parents and their 5–7‐year‐old children jointly read a storybook which had a surprise ending about the identity of the main character. Comments specific to the mental states of the story characters and discourse after the book had ended were positively related to children's ToM, and this was due to parent elaborations. Studies 2 and 3 examined children's mental state discourse during story‐telling tasks, and in both, mental state discourse of children during narrative was concurrently related to ToM performance. While research has shown that mental state discourse of parents is related to children's ToM acquisition, the current research indicates that children's spontaneous use of mental state language examined outside of the interactional context is also a strong correlate.     

Theory‐of‐Mind development and early sibling relationships after the birth of a sibling: Parental discipline matters

This study investigated relations among children's Theory‐of‐Mind (ToM) development, early sibling interactions, and parental discipline strategies during the transition to siblinghood. Using a sample of firstborn children and their parents (N = 208), we assessed children's ToM before the birth of a sibling and 12 months after the birth, and sibling interactions (i.e., positive engagement and antagonism) and parental discipline strategies (i.e., child‐centred and parent‐centred discipline) at 4 and 8 months in the first year of siblinghood. Structural equation modelling analyses revealed that children's ToM before the birth of the sibling predicted children's positive engagement with the infant sibling, whereas children's antagonistic behaviours towards the infant sibling negatively predicted children's ToM at 12 months, but only when mothers used low levels of child‐centred discipline. These findings emphasize the role of parents in the development of young children's social‐cognitive understanding in the context of early sibling interactions.

Highlights

• This study investigated relations among firstborns' Theory‐of‐Mind (ToM), early sibling relationships, and parental discipline during the first year of siblinghood.
• Multigroup analyses showed that ToM predicted higher sibling positive engagement, and early sibling antagonism predicted poorer ToM when mothers used low child‐centred discipline.
• Parental discipline plays an important role in the development of young children's social understanding and sibling relationships as early as the first year of siblinghood.

     

Children's Theory of Mind,Self‐Perceptions,and Peer Relations: A Longitudinal Study

This longitudinal study explored Theory of Mind (ToM), self‐perceptions, and teacher ratings of peer relations of 91 children (52 females, ages 6–8 years) drawn from two schools situated in a mainly Euro‐Canadian, middle socioeconomic status, semi‐rural central Canadian context. ToM, self‐perceptions, and teacher ratings of peer relations were assessed at Time 1 (T1, M = 6 y 2 m) and 2 years later at Time 2 (T2, M = 8 y 5 m). Findings showed that ToM scores and perceptions of global self‐worth and physical appearance significantly increased with time across both genders. Positive longitudinal associations were found between teacher ratings of sociable peer relations at T1 and children's T2 moral self‐perceptions. A positive longitudinal correlation was found between T1 ToM and T2 teacher ratings of anxious/fearful peer relations. Individual variation in ToM at age 6 predicted teacher ratings of anxious and fearful behaviours in 8 year olds. In contrast, teacher ratings at age 6 did not predict ToM ability in 8 year olds. Educational implications for social and emotional competencies are discussed. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

A lag between understanding false belief and emotion attribution in young children: Relationships with linguistic ability and mothers' mental‐state language

This study examines the contribution of children's linguistic ability and mothers' use of mental‐state language to young children's understanding of false belief and their subsequent ability to make belief‐based emotion attributions. In Experiment 1, children (N = 51) were given three belief‐based emotion‐attribution tasks. A standard task in which the protagonist was a story character and the emotional outcomes were imagined, and two videos in which the story protagonist was a real infant and the emotional outcomes were observable (high and low expressed emotion conditions). Children's verbal ability (semantic competence) was also measured. In Experiment 2, children (N = 75) were given two belief‐based emotion tasks: the standard story task and the high expressed emotion video. In addition, children's verbal ability (syntactic competence) and mothers' use of mental‐state attributes when describing their children were also measured. The results showed that: (1) the lag between understanding false belief and emotion attribution was a stable feature of children's reasoning across the three tests; and (2) children who were more linguistically advanced and whose mothers' described them in more mentalistic terms were more likely to understand the association between false belief and emotion. The findings underline the continuing importance of verbal ability and linguistic input for children's developing theory‐of‐mind understanding, even after they display an understanding of false belief.     

Children's interpretive understanding,moral judgments,and emotion attributions: Relations to social behaviour

The study investigated interpretive understanding, moral judgments, and emotion attributions in relation to social behaviour in a sample of 59 5‐year‐old, 123 7‐year‐old, and 130 9‐year‐old children. Interpretive understanding was assessed by two tasks measuring children's understanding of ambiguous situations. Moral judgments and emotion attributions were measured using two moral rule transgressions. Social behaviour was assessed using teachers' ratings of aggressive and prosocial behaviour. Aggressive behaviour was positively related to interpretive understanding and negatively related to moral reasoning. Prosocial behaviour was positively associated with attribution of fear. Moral judgments and emotion attributions were related, depending on age. Interpretive understanding was unrelated to moral judgments and emotion attributions. The findings are discussed in regard to the role of interpretive understanding and moral and affective knowledge in understanding children's social behaviour.     

Infant shy temperament predicts preschoolers Theory of Mind

The aim of this longitudinal study was to investigate the relation between infant temperament at 18 months and early Theory of Mind (ToM) abilities at 3 years of age. Temperament was assessed with the Early Childhood Behavior Questionnaire (ECBQ) and ToM by assessing children's understanding of divergent desires and beliefs, and of knowledge access. Our results are in line with a social-emotional reactivity perspective postulating more sophisticated ToM abilities for children with less reactive more observant temperament. Children with shy temperament at 18 months and at 3 years were better in reasoning about others’ mental states at age 3. Language, siblings and parental education had no effect on ToM. Findings indicate that temperament is related to ToM earlier in development than previously found, and that this relation is thus not unique to false-belief understanding.     

Cognitive load on working memory both encourages and discourages reasoning bias regarding the mental states of others

Theory of mind (ToM) refers to the ability to reason about the mental states of others. An increasing number of studies have revealed that working memory (WM) plays an important role in ToM. The present study applied WM loads to adults during a ToM task in order to investigate the impact on mental‐state reasoning performance. The task required participants to estimate the probabilities of several possible behaviours for a protagonist following the presentation of a ToM story. Participants were also required to maintain a meaningless two‐ (light WM load) or seven‐letter English alphabet string (heavy WM load) during story comprehension and mental‐state reasoning. The results show that the combination of light WM load applied during story comprehension with heavy WM load during mental‐state reasoning results in an overestimation of the probability that the protagonist's behaviour will accord with a participant's knowledge. Conversely, a heavy WM load applied during story comprehension, regardless of the type of WM load during mental‐state reasoning, did not result in this probability estimation bias. We discuss these findings from the perspective of a WM representation account.     

The Relation Between Children's Trust Beliefs and Theory of Mind Abilities

The study examined the relation between children's trust beliefs and Theory of Mind (ToM) abilities. A sample of 168 Italian children (M = 9 years–6 months, SD = 7 months) were administered the Italian Children's Generalized Trust Beliefs (ICGTB) Scale, two Second‐Order False Belief ToM measures, and an Advanced ToM measure. As expected, the ICGTB scale demonstrated: (1) validity by its three factor structure and (2) reliability by exhibiting acceptable internal consistency and test–retest stability. As expected, the children's emotional trust beliefs in others were associated with both second‐order false belief ToM ability and advanced ToM ability. These relations were not attributable to verbal ability. The findings are discussed with respect to the relations among children's emotional trust beliefs, personal disclosure, and quality of attachment. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

CHILDREN'S EXPERIENCE OF THREE TYPES OF CARTOON AT TWO AGE LEVELS*

Three cartoons were shown to 87 children at two age levels: 5–6 years, and 9 years. The children's experience was assessed in interviews. The younger children experienced the cartoons in a fragmentary manner and not as a continuous story, understood less of the cartoons, and tended to base their moral judgements of a character's behaviour on whether or not they identified with that character. Six months later, the younger children remembered best those scenes that had made them the most anxious earlier. A subgroup of children with abundant aggressive fantasies had a lower level of moral reasoning than the other children, preferred violent scenes, became less anxious while watching them and tended to give illogical explanations for the behaviour of the cartoon characters. The degree of anxiety provoked by a cartoon depended not on the amount of explicit violence shown but on the way the violence was presented. One cartoon, which contained no explicit violence, was considered the most frightening one due to its sound effects.     

Developing Moral Emotion Attributions in Happy Victimizer Task: Role of Victim Information

Previous happy victimizer (HV) studies have shown that preschool and early elementary school children attribute happy emotions to the violator of moral rules. This study examines the effects of information pertaining to the victim in HV stories on children's emotion attributions. In Study 1, 55 children (aged 5–6 and 7–8 years) participated. Participants heard three types of stories: (a) victim sadness resulting from a character's wrongdoing (normal HV story); (b) victim happiness resulting from a character's wrongdoing (non‐canonical HV story); and (c) victim sadness resulting from an accident (accident story). The children were required to infer the victimizer's feelings and to justify their attributions. Children demonstrated more positive emotion attributions for non‐canonical HV stories than the normal and accident versions. In Study 2, 57 children (aged 5–6 and 7–8 years) judged two types of HV tasks (a story featuring a younger child as victim and a normal HV story). Both groups demonstrated more negative emotion attributions for the young victim stories than the normal HV stories, indicating that children's judgment varied according to contexts and different information in determining emotion attributions.     

Perspective taking in children's narratives about jealousy

This study explored relationships between perspective‐taking, emotion understanding, and children's narrative abilities. Younger (23 5‐/6‐year‐olds) and older (24 7‐/8‐year‐olds) children generated fictional narratives, using a wordless picture book, about a frog experiencing jealousy. Children's emotion understanding was assessed through a standardized test of emotion comprehension and their ability to convey the jealousy theme of the story. Perspective‐taking ability was assessed with respect to children's use of narrative evaluation (i.e., narrative coherence, mental state language, supplementary evaluative speech, use of subjective language, and placement of emotion expression). Older children scored higher than younger children on emotion comprehension and on understanding the story's complex emotional theme, including the ability to identify a rival. They were more advanced in perspective‐taking abilities, and selectively used emotion expressions to highlight story episodes. Subjective perspective taking and narrative coherence were predictive of children's elaboration of the jealousy theme. Use of supplementary evaluative speech, in turn, was predictive of both subjective perspective taking and narrative coherence.     

A teacher‐centered exploration of the relevance of social factors to theory of mind development

Many accounts of children's Theory of Mind (ToM) development favor a cognitive explanation, for example, in terms of mental representational improvements at or before 4 years. Here, we investigated whether social factors as rated by a child's teacher, are related to ToM development. We tested 82 children of 3–6 years on each of four ToM tasks, and their class teacher completed a social questionnaire about each child's playing behavior, sharing, talkativeness, confidence, aggressiveness and outgoingness. A measure of task memory and the child's gender were also recorded. Here, children generally passed ToM tasks after 5 years‐old, but no one gender performed reliably better than the other. Teacher‐rated confidence and playing behavior were correlated to ToM. But in a regression analysis, these were replaced by teacher‐rated talkativeness; with age and memory given primacy in both sets of analyses. It is concluded that maturation and cognitive factors may well have primacy but social factors, facilitated during early primary education, must also be given a role in ToM development.     

Cumulative risk disparities in children's neurocognitive functioning: a developmental cascade model

The current longitudinal study examined the role of cumulative social risk on children's theory of mind (ToM) and executive functioning (EF) across early development. Further, we also tested a cascade model of development in which children's social cognition at 18 months was hypothesized to predict ToM and EF at age 4.5 through intermediary language skills at age 3. We then examined whether this developmental mechanism varied as a function of social risk status. Participants were 501 children recruited when they were newborns, at which point eight psychosocial risk factors were assessed and combined into a metric of cumulative social disadvantage. Families were followed up at 18 months, at which point four social‐cognitive skills were assessed using developmentally sensitive tasks: joint attention, empathy, cooperation, and self‐recognition. Language was measured at age 3 using a standardized measure of receptive vocabulary. At age 3 and 4.5, EF and ToM were measured using previously validated tasks. Results showed that there were notable cumulative risk disparities in overall neurocognitive skill development, and these effects became more differentiated over time. Support was also found for a developmental mechanism wherein the effect of social cognition at 18 months on ToM and EF in the preschool period operated specifically through children's receptive language ability at age 3. This pathway functioned similarly for children with both low‐ and high‐risk backgrounds. These results extend previous findings by documenting the role of cumulative social disadvantage on children's neurocognition and the pathways that link key neurocognitive abilities across early development.     

Bilingualism changes children's beliefs about what is innate

Young children engage in essentialist reasoning about natural kinds, believing that many traits are innately determined. This study investigated whether personal experience with second language acquisition could alter children's essentialist biases. In a switched‐at‐birth paradigm, 5‐ and 6‐year‐old monolingual and simultaneous bilingual children expected that a baby's native language, an animal's vocalizations, and an animal's physical traits would match those of a birth rather than of an adoptive parent. We predicted that sequential bilingual children, who had been exposed to a new language after age 3, would show greater understanding that languages are learned. Surprisingly, sequential bilinguals showed reduced essentialist beliefs about all traits: they were significantly more likely than other children to believe that human language, animal vocalizations, and animal physical traits would be learned through experience rather than innately endowed. These findings suggest that bilingualism in the preschool years can profoundly change children's essentialist biases.     

Early bilingualism enhances mechanisms of false‐belief reasoning

In their first years, children's understanding of mental states seems to improve dramatically, but the mechanisms underlying these changes are still unclear. Such ‘theory of mind’ (ToM) abilities may arise during development, or have an innate basis, developmental changes reflecting limitations of other abilities involved in ToM tasks (e.g. inhibition). Special circumstances such as early bilingualism may enhance ToM development or other capacities required by ToM tasks. Here we compare 3‐year‐old bilinguals and monolinguals on a standard ToM task, a modified ToM task and a control task involving physical reasoning. The modified ToM task mimicked a language‐switch situation that bilinguals often encounter and that could influence their ToM abilities. If such experience contributes to an early consolidation of ToM in bilinguals, they should be selectively enhanced in the modified task. In contrast, if bilinguals have an advantage due to better executive inhibitory abilities involved in ToM tasks, they should outperform monolinguals on both ToM tasks, inhibitory demands being similar. Bilingual children showed an advantage on the two ToM tasks but not on the control task. The precocious success of bilinguals may be associated with their well‐developed control functions formed during monitoring and selecting languages.     

What enhances the development of emotion understanding in young children? A longitudinal study of interpersonal predictors

We studied potential determinants of the development of children's emotion understanding (EU) from age 4 to 6 in a Norwegian community sample (N = 974) using the Test of Emotion Comprehension. Interpersonal predictors included the accuracy of parental mentalization, parental emotional availability, and teacher‐reported child social skills. Intrapersonal child factors were child gender and verbal skills. Overall, children's EU increased significantly over time. After adjusting for child gender, age‐4 EU, and parental socio‐economic status, greater child verbal and social skills and greater parental mentalization each uniquely predicted growth in EU. Results are discussed in terms of theory and research on children's EU and parents' emotion socialization.     

Pre‐school children's understanding of the emotional consequences for failures to act prosocially

This study compares 4‐ and 5‐year‐old children's assessment of the emotional consequences of failures to act prosocially with their assessment of the emotional consequences for prosocial and victimization situations. After listening to stories illustrating each of the socio‐moral situations, children rated the emotional consequences for an actor, recipient and observing teacher and justified their ratings. Findings show that pre‐school children's emotion ratings for failures to act prosocially differed from their emotion ratings for prosocial and victimization behaviours. Preschool children's ratings of an actor's emotions depended on the presence or absence of an observing teacher in prosocial and victimization situations, but not in failures to act prosocially. This study illustrates the complexity of young children's reasoning about failures to act prosocially and highlights the importance of contextual influences on children's understanding of socio‐moral emotions.     

Promoting Honesty: The Influence of Stories on Children's Lie‐Telling Behaviours and Moral Understanding

Moral stories are a means of communicating the consequences of our actions and emphasizing virtuous behaviour, such as honesty. However, the effect of these stories on children's lie‐telling has yet to be thoroughly explored. The current study investigated the influence of moral stories on children's willingness to lie for another individual. Children were read one of three stories prior to being questioned about an accidental wrongdoing: (1) a positive story, which emphasized the benefits of being honest; (2) a negative story, which outlined the potential costs of lying; and (3) a neutral story, which was unrelated to truth‐telling or lie‐telling. Initially, most children withheld information about the event. Older children were better able to maintain their lies throughout the interview. However, when asked direct questions, children in the positive story condition were more likely to tell the truth than those in the negative and neutral conditions. No significant differences were found between the negative and neutral story conditions. The present study also investigated the relationship between children's conceptual understanding and behaviour. The findings revealed that children's knowledge of truths and lies increased with age. Children who lied had significantly higher conceptual scores than those who did not lie. Furthermore, the type of story children were read had a significant impact on their evaluations of true and false statements. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Peer play,emotion understanding,and socio‐moral explanation: The role of gender

Engagement in peer play is an important factor in young children's adjustment as they make the transition to school. We evaluated individual differences in peer play within a sample of 58 children aged 4–5 years. Among boys, but not among girls, emotion understanding and verbal ability independently served as positive predictors of interactive peer play and negative predictors of disconnected play. Among girls, but not among boys, interactive peer play and socio‐moral reasoning about peer conflict situations independently predicted sociometric most‐like nominations. The results provide a foundation for further research on divergence in the early peer play of girls and boys.