Kristin Hansen Lagattuta

Differences in early parent-child conversations about negative versus positive emotions: implications for the development of psychological understanding.

The authors examined whether the quality and content of everyday parent-child conversations about negative emotions are the same or different from everyday talk about positive emotions. Extensive longitudinal speech samples of 6 children and their parents were analyzed for several critical features when the children were between 2 and 5 years of age. Results showed that children and parents talked about past emotions, the causes of emotions, and connections between emotions and other mental states at higher rates during conversations about negative emotions than during conversations about positive emotions. Discourse about negative emotions also included a larger emotion vocabulary, more open-ended questions, and more talk about other people. These differences appeared before the childrens 3rd birthdays and remained consistent through the preschool years. The findings strengthen and clarify current understanding of young childrens articulation and knowledge about peoples minds, lives, and emotions.

Thought-Bubbles Help Children with Autism Acquire an Alternative to a Theory of Mind

Children with autism have specific difficulties understanding complex mental states like thought, belief, and false belief and their effects on behaviour. Such children benefit from focused teaching, where beliefs are likened to photographs-in-the-head. Here two studies, one with seven participants and one with 10, tested a picture- in-the-head strategy for dealing with thoughts and behaviour by teaching children with autism about cartoon thought-bubbles as a device for representing such mental states. This prosthetic device led children with autism to pass not only false belief tests, but also related theory of mind tests. These results confirm earlier findings of the efficacy of picture-in-the-head teaching about mental states, but go further in showing that thought-bubble training more easily extends to children’s understanding of thoughts (not just behaviour) and to enhanced performance on several transfer tasks. Thought-bubbles provide a theoretically interesting as well as an especially easy and effective teaching technique.

Forgetting common ground: six- to seven-year-olds have an overinterpretive theory of mind.

Four- to 9-year-olds and adults (N = 256) viewed a series of pictures that were covered with occluders to reveal nondescript or identifiable parts. Participants predicted how 3 characters, 1 who had previously viewed the full picture and 2 who had not, would interpret the obstructed drawings. Results showed significant development between 4 and 9 years and between 9 years and adulthood in understanding thought diversity as well as situations in which people should think alike. There was also evidence for a U-shaped developmental curve, with 6- to 7-year-olds most often overextending the rule that people will think differently, particularly on the initial testing trials. Performance on the different interpretive theory-of-mind measures was differentially related to individual differences in inhibitory control and verbal working memory.

Grownups Are Not Afraid of Scary Stuff, but Kids Are: Young Children’s and Adults’ Reasoning About Children’s, Infants’, and Adults’ Fears

Three-, 5-, and 7-year-olds and adults (N= 64) listened to stories depicting 2 protagonists of different ages (infant and child or child and grown-up) that encounter an entity that looks like a real (e.g., a snake) or an imaginary (e.g., a ghost) fear-inducing creature. Participants predicted and explained each protagonists intensity of fear. Results showed significant age-related increases in knowledge that infants and adults would experience less intense fears than young children and that peoples fears are causally linked to their cognitive mental states. Across age, stories involving imaginary beings elicited more frequent mental explanations for fear than stories about real creatures. Results are discussed in relation to childrens developing awareness of the mind as mediating between situations and emotions.

Young Children’s Reasoning About the Effects of Emotional and Physiological States on Academic Performance

This study assessed young childrens understanding of the effects of emotional and physiological states on cognitive performance. Five, 6-, 7-year-olds, and adults (N= 96) predicted and explained how children experiencing a variety of physiological and emotional states would perform on academic tasks. Scenarios included: (a) negative and positive emotions, (b) negative and positive physiological states, and (c) control conditions. All age groups understood the impairing effects of negative emotions and physiological states. Only 7-year-olds, however, showed adult-like reasoning about the potential enhancing effects of positive internal states and routinely cited cognitive mechanisms to explain how internal states affect performance. These results shed light on theory-of-mind development and also have significance for childrens everyday school success.

Looking on the Bright Side: Children’s Knowledge About the Benefits of Positive Versus Negative Thinking

Five- to 10-year-olds (N = 90) listened to 6 illustrated scenarios featuring 2 characters that jointly experience the same positive event (and feel good), negative event (and feel bad), or ambiguous event (and feel okay). Afterward, one character thinks a positive thought and the other thinks a negative thought. Children predicted and explained each characters emotions. Results showed significant development between 5 and 10 years in childrens understanding that thinking positively improves emotions and thinking negatively makes one feel worse, with earliest knowledge demonstrated when reasoning about ambiguous and positive events. Individual differences in child and parental optimism and hope predicted childrens knowledge about thought-emotion connections on some measures, including their beliefs about the emotional benefits of thinking positively in negative situations.

Scaring the Monster Away: What Children Know About Managing Fears of Real and Imaginary Creatures

Children around 4, 5, and 7 years old (N = 48) listened to scenarios depicting a child alone or accompanied by another person (mother, father, friend) who encounters an entity that looks like a real or an imaginary fear-inducing creature. Participants predicted and explained each protagonists fear intensity and suggested coping strategies. Results showed age-related increases in judgments that different people will experience different intensities of fear in the same situation. With age, children also demonstrated increasing knowledge that peoples minds can both induce and reduce fear, especially in situations involving imaginary creatures. Suggestions of reality affirmation strategies (e.g., reminding oneself of what is real vs. not real) significantly increased with age, whereas positive pretense strategies (e.g., imagining it is a friendly ghost) significantly decreased.

Children's Judgments About Prosocial Decisions and Emotions: Gender of the Helper and Recipient Matters

Children ages 5-13 years (N = 82) responded to prosocial and prohibitive moral dilemmas featuring characters whose desires conflicted with another persons need for help or ownership rights. The gender of the characters matched for half the trials (in-group version) and mismatched for the other half (out-group version). Both boys and girls judged that people would more likely help and not harm the gender in-group versus out-group. Only girls exhibited gender bias in emotion attributions, expecting girls to feel happier helping girls and better ignoring the needs of boys. With increasing age, children exhibited greater awareness of the emotional benefits of prosocial sacrifice and made stronger distinctions by need level when evaluating prosocial decisions, obligations, and permissibility.

Not All Past Events Are Equal: Biased Attention and Emerging Heuristics in Children's Past‐to‐Future Forecasting

Four- to 10-year-olds and adults (N = 265) responded to eight scenarios presented on an eye tracker. Each trial involved a character who encounters a perpetrator who had previously enacted positive (P), negative (N), or both types of actions toward him or her in varying sequences (NN, PP, PN, and NP). Participants predicted the characters thoughts about the likelihood of future events, emotion type and intensity, and decision to approach or avoid. All ages made more positive forecasts for PP > NP > PN > NN trials, with differentiation by past experience widening with age. Age-related increases in weighting the most recent past event also appeared in eye gaze. Individual differences in biased visual attention correlated with verbal judgments. Findings contribute to research on risk assessment, person perception, and heuristics in judgment and decision making.

Beyond Sally's missing marble: further development in children's understanding of mind and emotion in middle childhood.

Research on the development of theory of mind (ToM), the understanding of people in relation to mental states and emotions, has been a vibrant area of cognitive development research. Because the dominant focus has been addressing when children acquire a ToM, researchers have concentrated their efforts on studying the emergence of psychological understanding during infancy and early childhood. Here, the benchmark test has been the false-belief task, the awareness that the mind can misrepresent reality. While understanding false belief is a critical milestone achieved by the age of 4 or 5, children make further advances in their knowledge about mental states and emotions during middle childhood and beyond. Thus, a comprehensive understanding of childrens sociocognitive abilities in older age groups is necessary to understand more fully the course of ToM development. The aim of this review is to outline continued development in ToM during middle childhood. In particular, we focus on childrens understanding of interpretation-that different minds can construct different interpretations of the same reality. Additionally, we consider childrens growing understanding of how mental states (thoughts, emotions, decisions) derive from personal experiences, cohere across time, and interconnect (e.g., thoughts shape emotions). We close with a discussion of the surprising paucity of studies investigating individual differences in ToM beyond age 6. Our hope is that this chapter will invigorate empirical interest in moving the pendulum toward the opposite research direction-toward exploring strengths, limitations, variability, and persistent errors in developing theories of mind across the life span.