Francesc Sidera

Do children realize that pretend emotions might be unreal

ABSTRACT This research is aimed at comparing childrens understanding of the distinction between external and internal emotion in deception and pretend play situations. A total of 337 children from 4 to 12 years of age participated in the study. Previous research suggests that in deception situations this understanding is very rudimentary at the age of 4 years, whereas 6-year-olds can articulate it in words. In the present work the children were asked to make this distinction in pretend play or deception tasks. The results show that in pretend play situations children start making this distinction at the age of 6 years, and their performance is better when the simulated emotion is negative rather than positive. These findings suggest that 4-year-olds are not aware that the emotions expressed in pretend play situations might be different from internal emotions.

Why Is Theory of Mind Important for Referential Communication

This research studies the relation between children’s Theory of Mind (ToM) and the communicative behaviour and strategies used in a referential communication task. A total of 46 children (aged 6 to 10) were administered 6 ToM tasks, and they also participated in pairs in a cooperative task. Each pair built 4 construction models. Results showed that several ToM skills were related to the communicative behaviours of requesting clarification and giving information. In addition, the most used communicative strategy was Joint review, in which participants reviewed together the location of their blocks. This strategy was the most related to ToM abilities and to cooperative success. The importance of ToM for developing the communicative behaviours and strategies necessary for cooperation is discussed.

Fostering theory of mind development. Short- and medium-term effects of training false belief understanding / Favorecer el desarrollo de la teoría de la mente. Efectos a corto y medio plazo de un entrenamiento en comprensión de la falsa creencia

Abstract This study examines the temporal effect of different trainings designed to favour the development of false belief understanding. A sample of 78 pre-school children aged between three years, five months and three years, 11 months was divided into three training conditions. After three training sessions, they were immediately evaluated in post-test 1 and again a month and a half later in post-test 2. The results showed that the efficiency of the training conditions depended both on the type of linguistic communication and on the use of deceptive objects. Also, the effect of the training was maintained for at least a month and a half after post-test 1 and it was transferred from the trained task to other false belief tasks. The results are commented according to the possibility of using language-based trainings to foster children’s theory of mind understanding in educational contexts.

Developmental Readiness in the Understanding of Own and Other's False Beliefs

One of the most important milestones in the development of theory of mind is the understanding of false beliefs. This study compares children’s understanding of representational change and others’ false beliefs and evaluates the effectiveness of an appearance-reality training for improving children’s false belief understanding. A total of 78 children ranging in age from 41 to 47 months were trained in three sessions and evaluated in a pretest and in a posttest. The results show that for children it is easier to understand representational change than false beliefs in others, and that the improvement after training was greater when starting from a higher score in the pretest. The implications of this for training in false belief understanding are discussed