Precursors of a theory of mind: A longitudinal study

The study examined whether the pointing gesture and intentional understanding abilities at 12 and 15 months of age predict the later understanding of perception and intention, as well as the ability to explain others' actions in a psychological way at 39 months of age. Thirty‐five infants (18 girls) were administered pointing and intention‐understanding tasks at the age of 12 and 15 months. Children were again evaluated at the age of 39 months with perception and intention tasks, and a psychological explanation task. Results showed that only 12‐month‐olds' comprehension of the pointing gesture with an imperative motive contributed to the prediction of later understanding of perception and mentalistic explanations of actions. Moreover, the ability of 12‐ and 15‐month‐olds to understand intentions contributed to the prediction of later preschool understanding of perceptions and intentions. These results indicate that a developmental trajectory in children's understanding of mental states from infancy to childhood is present, but depends on the level of engagement and communication that are required to perform these tasks.     

Young Children's Help‐Seeking as Active Information Gathering

Young children's social learning is a topic of great interest. Here, we examined preschoolers’ (M = 52.44 months, SD = 9.7 months) help‐seeking as a social information gathering activity that may optimize and support children's opportunities for learning. In a toy assembly task, we assessed each child's competency at assembling toys and the difficulty of each step of the task. We hypothesized that children's help‐seeking would be a function of both initial competency and task difficulty. The results confirmed this prediction; all children were more likely to seek assistance on difficult steps and less competent children sought assistance more often. Moreover, the magnitude of the help‐seeking requests (from asking for verbal confirmation to asking the adult to take over the task) similarly related to both competency and difficulty. The results provide support for viewing children's help‐seeking as an information gathering activity, indicating that preschoolers flexibly adjust the level and amount of assistance to optimize their opportunities for learning.     

Two‐year‐olds’ understanding of self‐symbols

This study investigated 48 2.5‐year‐olds’ ability to map from their own body to a two‐dimensional self‐representation and also examined relations between parents’ talk about body representations and their children's understanding of self‐symbols. Children participated in two dual‐representation tasks in which they were asked to match body parts between a symbol and its referent. In one task, they used a self‐symbol and in the other they used a symbol for a doll. Participants were also read a book about body parts by a parent. As a group, children found the self‐symbol task more difficult than the doll‐task; however, those whose parents explicitly pointed out the relation between their children's bodies and the symbols in the book performed better on the self‐symbol task. The findings demonstrate that 2‐year‐old children have difficulty comprehending a self‐symbol, even when it is two‐dimensional and approximately the same size as them, and suggest that parents’ talk about self‐symbols may facilitate their understanding.     

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.     

The role of eye‐gaze in understanding other minds

From an early age, infants are sensitive to eye‐gaze direction. This study examined Baron‐Cohen's (1994, 1995) claim that the ability to use eye‐gaze plays a crucial role in the child's developing understanding of other minds. Children aged 3 and 4 years participated in a face‐reading task, which assessed their capacity to infer mental states from a character's direction of eye‐gaze, and in a false‐belief task. As predicted, no child passed the false‐belief task without prior success on the face‐reading task. However, contrary to a central claim within Baron‐Cohen's model of mind‐reading, presentation of an eye‐gaze cue in the false‐belief task did not enhance children's performance. Furthermore, children did not solely rely on eye‐gaze as a cue, but used another directional cue (an arrow) in inferring a character's desire and intention. These results question the special role of eye‐gaze in the child's developing ability to mind‐read.     

Place‐value understanding in number line estimation predicts future arithmetic performance

In multi‐digit numbers, the value of each digit is determined by its position within the digit string. Children's understanding of this place‐value structure constitutes a building block for later arithmetic skills. We investigated whether a number line estimation task can provide an assessment of place‐value understanding in first grade. We hypothesized that estimating the position of two‐digit numbers requires place‐value understanding. Therefore, we fitted a linear function to children's estimates of two‐digit numbers and considered the resulting slope as a measure of children's place‐value understanding. We observed a significant correlation between this slope and children's performance in a transcoding task known to require place‐value understanding. Additionally, the slope for two‐digit numbers assessed at the beginning of grade 1 predicted children's arithmetic performance at the end of grade 1. These results indicate that the number line estimation task may indeed constitute a valid measure for first‐graders' place‐value understanding. Moreover, these findings are hard to reconcile with the view that number line estimation directly assesses a spatial representation of numbers. Instead, our results suggest that numerical processes involved in performing the task (such as place‐value understanding) may drive the association between number line estimation and arithmetic performance.     

Attachment and preschool children's understanding of maternal versus non‐maternal psychological states

There is growing evidence that insecurely attached children are less advanced in their social understanding than their secure counterparts. However, attachment may also predict how individual children use their social understanding across different relationships. For instance, the insecure child's social‐cognitive difficulties may be more pronounced when the psychological states of an attachment figure are being considered. In the current study, forty‐eight 4‐ to 5‐year‐old children were asked about their mothers' emotions and false beliefs, as well as those of non‐attachment figures. The Separation Anxiety Test (SAT) was administered to assess children's attachment representations. Children's SAT scores predicted their overall performance on the false belief and causes of emotion tasks, even after controlling for age and verbal ability. More interestingly, however, children with high scores on the Avoidance dimension of the SAT experienced greater difficulty understanding maternal false beliefs relative to those of an unfamiliar adult female. Thus, although attachment insecurity may hinder social‐cognitive development in general, the findings suggest that there are more specific effects as well. Attachment representations that are characterized by high levels of avoidance appear to interfere with children's ability to fully engage their social‐cognitive skills when reasoning about maternal mental states.     

Task‐related interactions between kindergarten children and their teachers: the role of emotional security

This study examined the emotional security of kindergarten children in dyadic task‐related interactions with their teachers. In particular, it examined the interrelations between security, task behaviours (persistence and independence), social inhibition, and teachers' support. Participants were 79 kindergartners (mean age=69.7 months) and their 40 regular teachers. Children were selected to approach a normal distribution of social inhibition. Children and teachers were filmed during a dyadic interaction task outside the classroom. Three groups of independent observers rated children's emotional security and their task behaviours, as well as teachers' supportive behaviours. Multilevel modelling revealed a positive link between teachers' support and emotional security. This link suppressed a negative relation between social inhibition and emotional security. In addition, emotional security was positively associated with children's task behaviours and mediated part of the positive link between these behaviours and teachers' support. Finally, security moderated the relation between support and persistence, such that the effect of teachers' support on persistent behaviours was amplified for relatively insecure children. These results highlight the importance of considering emotional security when examining the interactions between kindergarten children and their teachers. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

What Are You Really Saying? Associations between Shyness and Verbal Irony Comprehension

Verbal irony exploits the ambiguity inherent in language by using the discrepancy between a speaker's intended meaning and the literal meaning of his or her words to achieve social goals. Irony provides a window into children's developing pragmatic competence. Yet, little research exists on individual differences that may disrupt this understanding. For example, verbal irony may challenge shy children, who tend to interpret ambiguous stimuli as being threatening and who have difficulty mentalizing in social contexts. We examined whether shyness is related to the interpretation of ironic statements. Ninety‐nine children (8–12 year olds) listened to stories wherein one character made either a literal or ironic criticism or a literal or ironic compliment. Children appraised the speaker's belief and communicative intention. Shyness was assessed using self‐report measures of social anxiety symptoms and shy negative affect. Shyness was not related to children's comprehension of the counterfactual nature of ironic statements. However, shyness was related to children's ratings of speaker meanness for ironic statements. Thus, although not related to the understanding that speakers intended to communicate their true beliefs, shyness was related to children's construal of the social meaning of irony. Such subtle differences in language interpretation may underlie some of the social difficulties facing shy children. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Task demands and age‐related differences in retrieval and response inhibition

This study investigates the role of task demands on children's ability to inhibit irrelevant information using a block‐cued directed‐forgetting task. Recall performance was compared in a block‐cued directed‐forgetting task in which task demands had been decreased by presenting blocks of semantically related words with that in which unrelated words were presented. Inhibition patterns of recall were found at a younger age in the task that contained the related words than in the task that contained the unrelated words. These results suggest that previous results charting the development of cognitive inhibition may not have been exclusively the product of the development of inhibition, but rather a product of both the difficulty of the task and the development of inhibition.     

Self‐efficacy as a moderator of negative and positive self‐fulfilling prophecy effects: mothers' beliefs and children's alcohol use

This research examined two issues relevant to self‐fulfilling prophecies. First, it examined whether children's risk for alcohol use, as indicated by their self‐efficacy to refuse alcohol from peers, moderated their susceptibility to negative and positive self‐fulfilling prophecy effects created by their mothers. Second, it explored behavioral mediators that could be involved in the self‐fulfilling process between mothers and children. Longitudinal data from 540 mother–child dyads indicated that (1) low self‐efficacy children were more susceptible to their mothers' positive than negative self‐fulfilling effects, whereas high self‐efficacy children's susceptibility did not vary, (2) mothers' global parenting and children's perception of their friends' alcohol use partially mediated mothers' self‐fulfilling effects, and (3) these mediators contributed to low self‐efficacy children's greater susceptibility to positive self‐fulfilling prophecy effects. The power of self‐fulfilling prophecies, their link to social problems, and the potential for mothers' favorable beliefs to have a protective influence on adolescent alcohol use are discussed. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Parents' Estimations of Preschoolers' Number Skills Relate to at‐Home Number‐Related Activity Engagement

According to Hunt's match hypothesis, the accuracy of parents' beliefs about their children's abilities can influence the nature of the early learning experiences they provide. The present study examined the accuracy of parents' beliefs about their preschoolers' number development and relations to parent‐reported frequency of engaging children in number related experiences at home. Parents reported engaging their preschoolers more frequently in conventional numeracy activities, (i.e. counting and identifying numbers) than advanced number‐related activities (e.g. arithmetic) at home, though the frequency of advanced activities increased with the development of children's advanced number skills. Parents were most uncertain about their children's advanced number skills, though they demonstrated an overall tendency to overestimate their children's abilities across number tasks. Increased rates of overestimation and decreased rates of underestimation were associated with increased incidences of advanced activity engagement at home. Thus, results suggest guiding parents to understand their own children's numerical understanding in a wide range of number domains could promote more advanced at‐home number‐related activity engagement. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Cross‐sectional and longitudinal relations between mother‐child talk about conflict and children's social understanding

We examined the relations between the ways 48 mothers and their 3‐ to 5‐year‐olds talked about a conflict depicted in a picture book and their children's current and subsequent level of social understanding. We distinguished explanatory talk, which directed attention to the actions that generated the conflict, from non‐explanatory talk, which discussed the conflict in terms of, for example, making up or saying sorry. Controlling for child age and overall talk by mother, explanatory talk was positively associated with contemporaneous social understanding. Social understanding at time one was also positively associated with social understanding 30 months later. These data suggest that dialogue about conflict may be helpful for 3‐ to 5‐year old children's understanding of the mental world, to the extent that it facilitates their understanding of particular social situations.     

Heterogeneity in Maltreated and Non‐maltreated Preschool Children's Inhibitory Control: The Interplay Between Parenting Quality and Child Temperament

This study examined the contribution of child temperament, parenting, and their interaction on inhibitory control development in a sample of maltreated and non‐maltreated preschool children. One hundred and eighteen mother–child dyads were drawn from predominantly low‐income, rural communities. Dyads participated in a laboratory session in which maternal warm autonomy support, warm guidance, and strict/hostile control were observationally coded during a joint teaching task. Independent assessments of children's inhibitory control were obtained, and observers rated children's temperament. After relevant covariates, including income, maternal education, and child age and IQ were controlled for, there were no differences between the maltreatment and non‐maltreatment groups in either children's inhibitory control or mothers' behaviours in the laboratory session. Even after much of the variance in children's inhibitory control was accounted for from the covariates, children's temperamental negativity moderated the effects of warm autonomy support on inhibitory control in both maltreatment and non‐maltreatment groups. Temperamentally negative children whose mothers displayed more warm autonomy support showed greater inhibitory control, at levels on par with low‐negative children. Findings suggest that heterogeneity in children's self‐regulation may be due in part to individual differences in sensitivity to caregiver support for children's independence, even among those exposed to maltreatment. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Precursors of language ability and academic performance: an inter‐generational,longitudinal study of at‐risk children

The current investigation examined whether inter‐generational transfer of risk could be revealed through mothers' and preschool‐aged children's expressive language, and whether continuity of risk persisted in these children's academic abilities, 3 years later. Participating families were drawn from the Concordia Longitudinal Risk Project, a prospective, longitudinal investigation of French‐speaking families from low‐SES Montreal neighbourhoods. At Time 1, mothers' history of childhood social withdrawal was shown to predict mothers' child‐directed language. Mothers' language complexity was also shown to be predictive of preschoolers' expressive language and was found to mediate the relationship between maternal social withdrawal and child language. At Time 2, children's language‐related academic abilities were predicted by their expressive language at preschool age. The findings support an inter‐generational continuity of risk operating through language complexity and extending to children's performance in language‐related academic abilities at school age. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Children and adolescents’ understandings of family resemblance: A study of naïve inheritance concepts

This paper aims to provide developmental data on two connected naïve inheritance concepts and to explore the coherence of children's naïve biology knowledge. Two tasks examined children and adolescents’ (4, 7, 10, and 14 years) conceptions of phenotypic resemblance across kin (in physical characteristics, disabilities, and personality traits). The first task required participants to predict and explain feature outcomes in both an offspring and a sibling, in a modified version of the phenotypic similarity task. In the second task, participants offered explanations for instances of parent‐offspring dissimilarity and grandparent‐offspring resemblance (phenotypic difference task). The inclusion of two tasks and a broad age range revealed significant age trends between 4 and 10 years in naïve inheritance concepts. However, there was little consistency in children's inheritance explanations within or across tasks. The findings are discussed with reference to debates concerning the development and structure of naïve biology concepts.     

The Moderation Role of Self‐perceived Maternal Empathy in Observed Mother–Child Collaborative Problem Solving

Based on L. S. Vygotsky's sociocultural theory, previous scaffolding studies have examined some factors associated with adjustment of parental support during collaborative problem solving. However, a factor that remains unexplored in the literature is the potential relationship between parental empathy and parental support in collaborative problem solving. The present study addresses this question through the observation of 45 preschool children and their mothers cooperating in a problem‐solving task with two levels of difficulty. Teachers rated the children's fine motor skills, and sampled mothers reported their empathy levels towards their children. Consistent with the notion of scaffolding, negative correlations were found between observed maternal verbal support (cognitive, autonomy, and emotional) and child age, and between observed maternal cognitive support and teacher reports of child motor skills. An analysis of covariance revealed significant empathy‐by‐difficulty interactions for physical and cognitive support after controlling for the effect of child motor skills. Implications of these findings are discussed in terms of the role of child motor skills and the importance of parental empathy in collaborative problem solving. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

A Population‐Based Comparison of Female and Male Same‐Sex Parent and Different‐Sex Parent Households

This investigation compared Dutch same‐sex parent and different‐sex parent households on children's psychological well‐being, parenting stress, and support in child rearing. It was also assessed whether associations among children's well‐being, parenting stress, and support in child rearing were different in the two household types. Data were based on a nationally representative survey (N = 25,250). Matching was used to enhance similarity in background characteristics between both types of families. Parental and child characteristics were matched for 43 female same‐sex parent, 52 male same‐sex parent, and 95 different‐sex parent households with offspring between 5 and 18 years old. No significant differences were found on children's well‐being, problems in the parent–child relationship, being worried about the child, or the use of formal and informal support between mothers in same‐sex and different‐sex parent households or for fathers in same‐sex and different‐sex parent households. Regarding perceived confidence in child rearing, fathers in same‐sex parent households and mothers in different‐sex parent households felt less competent than their counterparts. Neither the associations between children's well‐being and the predictors (parenting stress variables) nor those between support and the predictors (parenting stress and children's well‐being) differed along household type. In this population‐based study, the similarity in child outcomes regardless of household type confirms the results of prior investigations based on convenience samples. These findings are pertinent to family therapists, practitioners, court officials, and policymakers who seek information on parenting experiences and child outcomes in female and male same‐sex parent families.     

“They Danced Around in My Head and I Learned Them”: Children's Developing Conceptions of Learning

Two studies examined how 3–6-year-olds understand the process of learning. In study 1 examined how children spontaneously talk about learning via a CHILDES language analysis. Talk about the learning process increased between the ages of 3–5. Talk specifically about learning in terms of desire decreased during this period. This suggests the possibility that desire is important to children's initial understanding of learning, and children develop an understanding that various mental states including desire, attention, and intention, play a role in the learning process. In Study 2, we presented 4- and 6-year-olds with a set of stories designed to test their understanding of the role of these mental states. In both their judgments about whether someone learns and their justifications of their responses, younger children relied more on the character's desires whereas older children were more likely to integrate desire, attention, and intention together. These data suggest that children's understanding of the process of learning is developing during the early elementary school years.     

Surface‐ and deep‐level dissimilarity effects on social integration and individual effectiveness related outcomes in work groups: A meta‐analytic integration

Prior research linking demographic (e.g., age, ethnicity/race, gender, and tenure) and underlying psychological (e.g., personality, attitudes, and values) dissimilarity variables to individual group member's work‐related outcomes produced mixed and contradictory results. To account for these findings, this study develops a contingency framework and tests it using meta‐analytic and structural equation modelling techniques. In line with this framework, results showed different effects of surface‐level (i.e., demographic) dissimilarity and deep‐level (i.e., underlying psychological) dissimilarity on social integration, and ultimately on individual effectiveness related outcomes (i.e., turnover, task, and contextual performance). Specifically, surface‐level dissimilarity had a negative effect on social integration under low but not under high team interdependence. In return, social integration fully mediated the negative relationship between surface‐level dissimilarity and individual effectiveness related outcomes under low interdependence. In contrast, deep‐level dissimilarity had a negative effect on social integration, which was stronger under high and weaker under low team interdependence. Contrary to our predictions, social integration did not mediate the negative relationship between deep‐level dissimilarity and individual effectiveness related outcomes but suppressed positive direct effects of deep‐level dissimilarity on individual effectiveness related outcomes. Possible explanations for these counterintuitive findings are discussed.