People are intrinsically motivated to connect to others socially. One of the most important mechanisms in fostering social relationships is social perspective taking (SPT)--the capacity to discern the thoughts and feelings of others. Thus, students in social studies classrooms might be motivated to engage with their subject either through taking…

In the last decade, the issue of teaching the Palestinian perspective on the Jewish-Arab conflict in Israeli schools gave rise to considerable debate and competing curricula. A quasi-experimental study compared the effects of these competing approaches on learners' attitudes to out-group narratives and perceived in-group responsibility (IR). A…

In research on theory of mind (ToM) in individuals with an autism spectrum disorder (ASD) mainly static mind-reading tasks were used. In this study both a static (Eyes Test) and a more naturalistic (empathic accuracy task) ToM measure were used to investigate the perspective taking abilities of adolescents with ASD (n = 13), adolescents with…

Personal pronouns, such as "I" and "you", require a speaker/listener to continuously re-map their reciprocal relation to their referent, depending on who is saying the pronoun. This process, called "deictic shifting", may underlie the incorrect production of these pronouns, or "pronoun reversals", such as referring to oneself with the pronoun…

Based on the theoretical analysis of self-consciousness concepts, we hypothesized that the spatio-temporal pattern of functional connectivity within the default-mode network (DMN) should persist unchanged across a variety of different cognitive tasks or acts, thus being task-unrelated. This supposition is in contrast with current understanding…

Studies with infants show divergence between performance on theory of mind tasks depending on whether "direct" or "indirect" measures are used. It has been suggested that direct measures assess a flexible but cognitively demanding ability to reason about the minds of others, whereas indirect measures assess distinct processes…

Education in the twenty-first century requires that all students learn the social studies skills that help them understand the complex issues related to civic ideals and practices. One of these skills is developing multiple perspective-taking. Many educators believe that this critical thinking ability is not only for upper level students but also…

Upon learning the outcome to a problem, people tend to believe that they knew it all along ("hindsight bias"). Here, we report the first study to trace the development of hindsight bias across the life span. One hundred ninety-four participants aged 3 to 95 years completed 3 tasks designed to measure visual and verbal hindsight bias. All age…

A number of recent studies suggested that visuo-spatial perspective taking (VSPT) occurs spontaneously when viewing either a human body or an action by an agent. However, it remains unclear whether VSPT is caused by the observation of an (potential) action or occurs because the observer infers from certain cues that another mind is present…

We used a randomized quasi-experimental design to test the effectiveness of three types of perspective-taking condition in a forgiveness education program. Allport's Contact Hypothesis was used as a framework for the study design. Eighth graders (n?=?132) in an urban Midwestern city were invited to participate. We evaluated the effectiveness of…

This article discusses five generally accepted reasons to use data as a part of an educator's ongoing professional practice. Of course, there are many other more specific reasons one might look at data, but these five cover the overarching need in an educational setting. The five major purposes for using data are: (1) To enhance understanding and…

Pronoun reversal, the use of "you" for self-reference and "I" for an addressee, has often been associated with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) and impaired language. However, recent case studies have shown the phenomenon also to occur in typically developing and even precocious talkers. This study examines longitudinal corpus data from two…

This study compared cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) and treatment-as-usual (TAU) in terms of effects on observed social communication-related autism symptom severity during unstructured play time at school for children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD). Thirteen children with ASD (7-11 years old) were randomly assigned to 32 sessions of CBT…

Background: A deficit in empathy is discussed to underlie difficulties in social interaction of children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and conduct disorder (CD). To date, no study has compared children with ASD and different subtypes of CD to describe disorder-specific empathy profiles in clinical samples. Furthermore, little is known about…

"Using your profanisaurus" derives from a project, "The Production of University English", whose earliest findings were published in "Arts and Humanities in Higher Education" in 2005. By analysing "ordinary" discussions in "ordinary" English Literature classes in diverse universities, the project…