An experimental investigation of thought suppression

An experiment investigating the hypothesis that trying to suppress a thought will lead to an immediate and/or delayed increase in its occurrence is reported. Normal subjects listened to a taped story and then verbalized their stream of consciousness during two consecutive time periods. During the first period, one group (suppression) were asked not to think about the tape while two other groups (controls) were asked to think about anything or think about anything including the tape. During the second period, all three groups were instructed to think about anything. Results from the first period failed to support the immediate enhancement hypothesis as the suppression group reported less thoughts about the tape than the controls. However, results from the second period supported the delayed (rebound) hypothesis as subjects who had previously suppressed reported more thoughts about the tape than subjects who had not. The theoretical, methodological, and clinical implications of these results are discussed.     

Keeping fathers in mind

This paper focuses on keeping fathers in mind – in the mind of the mother and the mind of the therapist – as a symbol and as an actual person so that he can become a healthy presence in the mind of the child. Through its myths and laws, mainstream Indian culture constantly reinforces the idea that the child belongs first to the man who places ownership over a womb. This paper will focus on the importance of the father as a parent and not only as a sexual partner or keeper of the mother. It will illustrate that the actual presence of the father qualitatively enhances the child’s capacities and that the father’s absence or disengagement deeply and painfully affect a young boy. Through an account of some clinical work with young boys at a community-based psychotherapy clinic, the paper aims to illustrate the need of the boy for a good enough father, the reluctance of fathers to be involved in the parenting of their children, and the role of the mother in drawing in the father to be actively paternal.     

Developing organization of mental verbs: Evidence for the development of a constructivist theory of mind in middle childhood

Two experiments examined the development of a theory of mind in middle childhood by examining changes in the organization of mental verbs of knowing. In both experiments, children and adults rated the similarity of pairs of mental verbs in terms of the way they felt they used their mind in each one. Experiment 1 used thirty-six 8- and thirty-four 10-year-olds, and 27 adults. In Experiment 2, 9- and 11-year-old children were classified according to their cognitive monitoring ability (Markman, 1981). Fifteen cognitive monitoring and 15 nonmonitoring children were used, and 33 adults also participated. Multidimensional scaling (MDS) analyses of each group's ratings indicated that participants distinguished mental verbs according to the certainty aspects and information processing aspects of mental activity. Older children and comprehension monitors placed greater emphasis on the certainty aspects of mental activity than younger children and comprehension nonmonitors. It is concluded that important aspects of a constructivist theory of mind develop during middle childhood.     

Young Children and Adults’ Sensitivity to Contexts for Social Conventions in Make-Believe Play

The author focused on how young children understand the nature of social conventions relating to pretend play. Twenty 4-year-olds, fifteen 6-year-olds, and 20 adults (undergraduate students) listened to vignettes in which a new child in each vignette violated a convention used by other children while playing. Participants indicated whether the violations would be corrected and whether someone needed to teach the conventions to the new children. The scope of a convention (wide versus narrow) in combination with how long the convention has been used affected 6-year-olds’ responses but not the responses of younger children or adults. In addition, there were age-related differences in participants’ beliefs about who could teach characters about the conventions and why characters might not need to be taught by others. These results demonstrate that children at the start of middle childhood can be sensitive to contextual differences in the conventions that shape everyday activities more so than adults and younger children.     

Inside the mind reader's tool kit: projection and stereotyping in mental state inference

Mental state inferences--judgments about what others think, want, and feel--are central to social life. Models of "mind reading" have considered main effects, including social projection and stereotyping, but have not specified the conditions that govern when these tools will be used. This article develops such a model, claiming that when perceivers assume an initial general sense of similarity to a target, they engage in greater projection and less stereotyping. Three studies featuring manipulations of similarity support this claim. Moreover, reaction time results shed light on the mechanisms underlying these effects. The proposed model gives a new view of the mind reader's tool kit and, more generally, raises questions about moderators of stereotyping and projection in social judgment.     

Suppressing and attending to pain-related thoughts in chronic pain patients

Attempted suppression of pain-related thoughts was investigated in consecutive referrals for pain management (N = 39). Participants monitored their pain-related thoughts for three 5-min periods. In period 1, all participants were instructed to think about anything. For period 2, participants were instructed to either suppress pain-related thoughts, attend to pain-related thoughts, or to continue to think about anything. In period 3, all participants were again instructed to think about anything. Participants instructed to attend to their pain reported more pain-related thoughts than suppressors and controls in both periods 2 and 3. Suppressors experienced reduced pain-related thoughts during period 2. There was no immediate enhancement or delayed increase.     

A Dollar Is a Dollar Is a Dollar,or Is It? Insights From Children's Reasoning About “Dirty Money”

Money can take many forms—a coin or a bill, a payment for an automobile or a prize for an award, a piece from the 1989 series or the 2019 series, and so on—but despite this, money is designed to represent an amount and only that. Thus, a dollar is a dollar, in the sense that money is fungible. But when adults ordinarily think about money, they think about it in terms of its source, and in particular, its moral source (e.g., dirty money). Here we investigate the development of the belief that money carries traces of its moral history. We study children ages 5–6 and 8–9, who are sensitive to both object history and morality, and thus possess the component pieces needed to think that a dollar may not be like any other. Across three principal studies (and three additional studies in Appendix S1 ; N = 327; 219 five- and six-year-olds; 108 eight- and nine-year-olds), we find that children are less likely to want money with negative moral history, a pattern that was stronger and more consistent among 8- and 9-year-olds than 5- and 6-year-olds. These findings highlight pressing directions for future research that could help shed light on the mechanisms that contribute to the belief that money carries traces of its moral history.     

Kindred spirits: Influences of siblings' perspectives on theory of mind

Two experiments were conducted to examine the development of a theory of mind in 265 children aged 3 to 5 years from families of varied size. Even after verbal mental age was controlled, those who had a sibling aged 12 months to 12 years outperformed only-children in both experiments. However, the presence of a very young infant, or of siblings who were teenagers or young adults, exerted no benefit. Also, in contrast to some previous studies, younger child siblings and twins were just as helpful as older child siblings. The presence of multiple child siblings of varied ages above and below that of the participant predicted advanced theory of mind development over and above the effects of own age and verbal ability, despite the fact that neither overall family size nor birth order were significant predictors. These findings were reconciled with those of previous sibling constellation research around a model of family social influences in which the opportunity to play, converse, and disagree in distinctively childish ways with brothers and sisters provides unique insights into the workings of the human mind.     

Keeping the reader's mind in mind: Development of perspective-taking in children's dictations

This study investigated when children can take the perspective of their reader if the information-processing demands of writing are removed by means of dictation to a scribe. Participants (N = 96) aged 5, 6 and 7 years dictated letters to an addressee who possessed requisite content knowledge, and then revised the letter or dictated a new letter to an addressee who lacked this knowledge (counterbalanced). Results showed that 19% of 5-year-olds, 41% of 6-year-olds, and 72% of 7-year-olds considered their reader's missing knowledge. Children's awareness of their reader's knowledge was neither related to performance on higher-order theory of mind tasks, nor to measures of executive function. Significantly greater perspective-taking was demonstrated in children's new letters than revised letters. However, although revision is considered a late-developing skill, half of even the 5-year-olds were able to make revisions (albeit few revisions demonstrated actual perspective-taking). Findings have significant implications for the emergent-literacy curriculum.     

Mental playmates: Siblings,executive functioning and theory of mind

This study assessed the theory of mind (ToM) and executive functioning (EF) abilities of 124 typically developing preschool children aged 3 to 5 years in relation to whether or not they had a child‐aged sibling (i.e. a child aged 1 to 12 years) at home with whom to play and converse. On a ToM battery that included tests of false belief, appearance‐reality (AR) and pretend representation, children who had at least 1 child‐aged sibling scored significantly higher than both only children and those whose only siblings were infants or adults. The numbers of child‐aged siblings in preschoolers' families positively predicted their scores on both a ToM battery (4 tasks) and an EF battery (2 tasks), and these associations remained significant with language ability partialled out. Results of a hierarchical multiple regression analysis revealed that independent contributions to individual differences in ToM were made by language ability, EF skill and having a child‐aged sibling. However, even though some conditions for mediation were met, there was no statistically reliable evidence that EF skills mediated the advantage of presence of child‐aged siblings for ToM performance. While consistent with the theory that distinctively childish interaction among siblings accelerates the growth of both ToM and EF capacities, alternative evidence and alternative theoretical interpretations for the findings were also considered.     

Young children's knowledge about the influence of thoughts on emotions in rule situations

Four‐year‐olds, 5‐year‐olds, and adults (N = 48) listened to stories featuring characters that experienced one of four types of thoughts after deciding to transgress or comply with a rule: thoughts about desires, rules, future negative outcomes, or future punishment. Participants predicted and explained the characters’ emotions. Results showed that young children, as with adults, predicted positive emotions for willpower and negative emotions for transgression at low rates for the think‐desire trials, and at high rates for the think‐rule and think‐future trials. They also modified their emotion explanations in line with the focus of characters’ thoughts. These data provide unprecedented evidence that young children can reason flexibly about emotions in rule situations when provided explicit, salient information about people's thoughts.     

Turning Believers into Skeptics: 3-Year-Olds' Sensitivity to Cues to Speaker Credibility

Under most circumstances, children (and adults) can safely assume that the testimony they hear is true. In two studies, we investigated whether 3-year-olds (N = 100) would continue to hold this assumption even if the person who provided the testimony behaved in an uncertain, ignorant, and/or distracted manner. In Study 1, children were less likely to trust that, for example, a key-like object was a spoon if the speaker indicated uncertainty about her testimony (e.g., “I think this is a spoon”) than if she simply labeled the object ostensively (e.g., “This is a spoon”). In Study 2, 3-year-olds were also more skeptical about a speaker's testimony when she had earlier made an obvious naming error and seemed distracted, but not when she either made an error or seemed distracted. These results indicate that 3-year-olds can respond differently to the same testimony, depending on the speaker's behavior.     

From children's hands to adults' ears: gesture's role in the learning process

Children can express thoughts in gesture that they do not express in speech--they produce gesture-speech mismatches. Moreover, children who produce mismatches on a given task are particularly ready to learn that task. Gesture, then, is a tool that researchers can use to predict who will profit from instruction. But is gesture also useful to adults who must decide how to instruct a particular child? We asked 8 adults to instruct 38 third- and fourth-grade children individually in a math problem. We found that the adults offered more variable instruction to children who produced mismatches than to children who produced no mismatches--more different types of instructional strategies and more instructions that contained two different strategies, one in speech and the other in gesture. The children thus appeared to be shaping their own learning environments just by moving their hands. Gesture not only reflects a child's understanding but can play a role in eliciting input that could shape that understanding. As such, it may be part of the mechanism of cognitive change.     

Stereotyped beliefs about desirability: implications for characterizing the child's theory of mind

A central research issue in the child's theory of mind literature is the question of whether children appreciate the subjectivity of mental phenomena. The typical research paradigm involves researchers creating a discrepancy between children's own mental states and the mental state of a protagonist, and then asking children to predict the protagonist's reaction. A prediction that fits the child's own mental state (rather than the beliefs and desires of the protagonist) is seen as an indication that the child fails to acknowledge the subjectivity of mental phenomena.Here we present two experiments involving the use of desire statements in predicting other people's emotions which demonstrate that even when one does acknowledge the subjectivity of mental states, this does not necessarily leads to ‘correct’ predictions (e.g. predictions based on the protagonist's desires). Other factors, such as cultural knowledge, might influence this process. The first experiment demonstrates that even adults, with a fully operational theory of mind, sometimes choose to disregard information about other people's desires. Their own generalized beliefs about desirability appear to be instrumental in this respect. The second experiment, on sex-stereotyped preferences for toys, demonstrates that even young children already can use generalized beliefs about desirability as a basis for their predictions of others’ emotions, even when these beliefs on desirability do not coincide with their own desires. This strategy results in a response pattern that can be easily misconceived as an indication that the child does not yet appreciate the subjectivity of desires.Two remarks are made on the basis of these experiments. First, even a so-called ‘adult’ theory of mind tends to be affected by normative considerations and is therefore more complex than straightforward desire-belief reasoning. Second, whenever normative considerations come into play, researchers should be cautious that ‘correct’ answers in theory of mind testing may not always have been based on theory of mind reasoning, and that ‘incorrect’ answers do not necessarily imply the absence of an active theory of mind.     

Gestures convey substantive information about a child’s thoughts to ordinary listeners

The gestures that spontaneously occur in communicative contexts have been shown to offer insight into a child’s thoughts. The information gesture conveys about what is on a child’s mind will, of course, only be accessible to a communication partner if that partner can interpret gesture. Adults were asked to observe a series of children who participated ‘live’ in a set of conservation tasks and gestured spontaneously while performing the tasks. Adults were able to glean substantive information from the children’s gestures, information that was not found anywhere in their speech. ‘Gesture-reading’ did, however, have a cost – if gesture conveyed different information from speech, it hindered the listener’s ability to identify the message in speech. Thus, ordinary listeners can and do extract information from a child’s gestures, even gestures that are unedited and fleeting.     

Author Index: Volume 1, 2000

Five-year-olds, 5½-year-olds, 6-year-olds, and adults were tested for the presence of two intuitions about thinking hypothesized to be part of the adult theory of mind (a) when engaged in a mentally demanding activity, a person's thinking will be directed toward that activity, and (b) when the activity is not mentally demanding, the person's thinking is likely to wander elsewhere. The adult participants gave clear evidence of possessing these intuitions, both in their responses and in their justifications of their responses. Many of the child participants, especially the older ones, also responded as if they had at least some grasp of them. These intuitions appear to form part of a family of fundamental intuitions concerning the what and when of thinking that are in the process of acquisition during the late preschool and middle-childhood years.     

5～8岁儿童对模糊信息具有多重解释的理解

参照Carpendale和Chandler的实验范式,研究儿童对于“人们可能对同样信息给出不同解释”这一现象的理解,考察5~8岁儿童的解释性心理理论的发展。结果表明,5岁儿童不能理解心理过程的解释性,认为同样的信息只有一种合理的解释。从6岁开始,儿童才认识到,模糊信息可以有多种解释,但6、7岁时的这种理解并不完善,成绩随着任务要求而变化。8岁儿童才有比较稳定的解释性心理理论。     

The natural emergence of reasoning about the afterlife as a developmental regularity

Participants were interviewed about the biological and psychological functioning of a dead agent. In Experiment 1, even 4- to 6-year-olds stated that biological processes ceased at death, although this trend was more apparent among 6- to 8-year-olds. In Experiment 2, 4- to 12-year-olds were asked about psychological functioning. The youngest children were equally likely to state that both cognitive and psychobiological states continued at death, whereas the oldest children were more likely to state that cognitive states continued. In Experiment 3, children and adults were asked about an array of psychological states. With the exception of preschoolers, who did not differentiate most of the psychological states, older children and adults were likely to attribute epistemic, emotional, and desire states to dead agents. These findings suggest that developmental mechanisms underlie intuitive accounts of dead agents' minds.     

Children do not follow the rule "ignorance means getting it wrong"

Two experiments tested whether 4- and 5-year-olds follow the rule “ignorance means you get it wrong.” Following this rule should lead children to infer that a character who is ignorant about some situation will also have a false belief about it. This rule should sometimes lead children into error because ignorance does not imply false belief. In Experiment 1, children and adults were told about a girl who is looking for her dog but does not know which of two boxes it is under. Most children predicted that the girl would look in the box with the dog and not in the empty box; adults chose both boxes equally. Experiment 2 used a similar story but varied whether the girl wants to approach or avoid her dog. Again, most children predicted that the girl would succeed. These findings suggest that children do not follow the rule “ignorance means you get it wrong.”