Forty-eight children aged four and six years listened to stories in which it would be appropriate for the protagonist to feel a negative emotion. Results indicated that six-year-olds were more accurate than four-year-olds in judging that real and apparent emotion would not coincide when the protagonist hid feelings. (RJC)

Children of the Baka, a preliterate society of Pygmies in southeast Cameroon, were tested for their conception of mind. Several studies conducted in other countries were reviewed. Results provide support for the claim that belief-desire reasoning is universally acquired in childhood. (GLR)

Critiques an article cautioning that children may perform poorly when questioned by professionals about emotional or painful events. Asserts that young children have the vocabulary to report feelings of distress or anger, even if they sometimes fail to make use of that vocabulary in particular contexts. (CR)

Children ages 3 to 5 years old are observed in a series of 3 experiments assessing their use of counterfactual thinking in causal reasoning. Results suggest that young children readily interpret the cause of an outcome in terms of a contrast between the observed sequence of events, and a counterfactual alternative in which the outcome did not…

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…