This study examined parent-child emotion discourse, children's independent social information processing, and social skills outcomes in 146 families of 8-year-olds with and without developmental delays. Children's emergent social-cognitive understanding (internal state understanding, perspective taking, and causal reasoning and problem solving)…

This study describes the development of social reasoning in school-age children. An irony task is used to assess 5-, 7-, and 9-year-olds' (N = 72) and adults' (N = 24) recursive understanding of others' minds. Guttman scale analysis demonstrates that in order to understand a speaker's communicative intention, a child needs to recognize the…

Classic theories of self-development suggest people define themselves in part through internalized perceptions of other people's beliefs about them, known as reflected self-appraisals. This study uses functional magnetic resonance imaging to compare the neural correlates of direct and reflected self-appraisals in adolescence (N = 12, ages 11-14…

Although "hindsight bias" (the "I knew it all along" phenomenon) has been documented in adults, its development has not been investigated. This is despite the fact that hindsight bias errors closely resemble the errors children make on theory of mind (ToM) tasks. Two main goals of the present work were to (a) create a battery of hindsight tasks…

The ability of preschool-age children to modify their verbal communication as a function of listener attributes was explored. (JMB)

Children of ages two and one-half, three, and three and one-half years were tested for their understanding of object hiding. Results indicated that children of this age can be both nonegocentric and skillful at estimating what other people do and do not see under various viewing conditions. (JMB)

Predicted that a particular form of perspective-taking skill, as assessed within a communication setting, would show a strong relationship to referential communication skill. A total of 42 children four- to six-years-old were tested. Results indicated that the ability to appreciate a listener's informational needs was strongly related to…

To examine the hypothesis that children's difficulties on traditional perspective-taking tasks are in part due to intellectual realism (inappropriately including what is known to exist in a representation of what is seen), 60 three-, four-, and five-year-old children were asked to select representations of various arrangements of blocks.…

Three role-taking tasks assessing children's ability to infer another's intentions, thoughts, and feelings were adapted for videotaped presentation and used to examine the coherence of role-taking abilities. Subjects were 110 second grade boys and girls. (Author/JMB)

A sample of 36 children 5 years of age were trained in perspective-taking skills in order to assess the effectiveness of various types of feedback in training. (Author/JMB)

An experiment was conducted with 40 children, ages four to six, who were tested from both "good" and "poor" viewing positions on a perspective-taking task. As hypothesized, children showed no bias toward the view they chose when it was poor. However, when they had a good view they chose their own rather than another equally…

Children aged two and one-half to five years gave moral evaluations, attributions of parental affect, and personal liking evaluations of both standard (motive and outcome) moral episodes and simplified (motive only) episodes. (JMB)

Four experiments studied 4- to 6-year-old children's understanding of inferential reasoning as a source of knowledge. To assess understanding that knowledge of relevant premises leads to knowledge of the conclusion, children had to judge the knowledge of another person, who was presented to the child as being aware of two premises. (Author/BN)

Studies investigated the development of children's ability to differentiate what they see from what they know in the context of conceptual perspective taking. Two developmental levels accounted for children's performance when they were asked about a naive observer's knowledge of the identity of objects. Perspective awareness training improved…