Emotion plays an important role in how young people acquire the skills, knowledge, and dispositions of engaged citizenship, including being able to empathize, listen to multiple perspectives, and build relationships of solidarity with others. This study investigated how social emotional learning (SEL) standards in 17 U.S. states guided the…

The ability to make inferences about what one's peers know is critical for social interaction and communication. Three experiments (n = 309) examined the curse of knowledge, the tendency to be biased by one's knowledge when reasoning about others' knowledge, in children's estimates of their peers' knowledge. Four- to 7-year-olds were taught the…

In this study, a grounded theory approach was adopted to develop the "heterospective reflection framework" as an explanatory and analytical schema for the investigation of reflection on the action of others via video observations. Borrowed from the arts, the term heterospective denotes "otherness." Data collection was conducted…

This study examined the impact of a workshop for teachers entitled 'Things are Not Always What They Seem'. The workshop's aim was to raise awareness of teachers' roles in heterogenic classrooms. The study's primary assumption was the importance of increasing teachers' awareness of their biases and the need to foster intercultural sensitivity. To…

In this essay, I draw upon Ellen J. Langer's notions of mindlessness and mindfulness to identify and delineate Confucius' views on mindfulness. Langer's theory exemplifies a social-cognitive approach to mindfulness which is a prominent orientation in the extant research. I argue that Confucius, like Langer, rejects mindlessness that is…

The ability to understand the mental states of other individuals is central to human social behavior, yet some theory of mind capacities are shared with other species. Comparisons of theory of mind skills across humans and other primates can provide a critical test of the cognitive prerequisites necessary for different theory of mind skills to…

In this theoretical paper, selected areas of moral development as well as some of the respective theories and models are used to characterise positive, healthy moral development. Such moral development is seen as one prerequisite of nonkilling. From a lifespan perspective, core concepts such as moral motivation and moral agency are combined into…

Developmental research has long sought to understand children's social ideas, and particularly how those ideas influence their judgments and behaviors toward other people. We examine the idea of "common humanity," a social idea that has been investigated historically and philosophically, to re-consider what is already known about…

The current research aims at constructing a developmentally sensitive mindreading scale (i.e., a battery of tasks measuring different aspects of mindreading ability in children from 1 to 3.5 years of age). Over 300 Polish children were tested at six-month intervals with 48 different tasks designed to measure mindreading ability (for a total of six…

The present study aims to provide a systematic understanding of how perspective-taking ability contributes to primary-school students' cooperative behaviours and learning outcomes. The present study is frontline as we combined person-oriented (e.g., describing patterns of behaviours based on individual characteristics), process-oriented (e.g.,…

Wayfinding is one of the most important skills that children have to learn in order to safely move in the environment. One problem that 5-year-old children encounter with wayfinding is changing their point of view to that of another person in different position in the same environment, such as that of a person opposite them whose perspective is…

Perspective-taking plays an important role in daily life, allowing consideration of other people's perspectives and viewpoints. This study used a large sample of 265 community-based participants (aged 20-86 years) to examine changes in perspective-taking abilities--a component of "Theory of Mind"--across adulthood, and how these changes…

Researchers typically embark on interdisciplinarity after the acquisition of disciplinary expertise. This article explores the possibility of teaching interdiciplinarity to undergraduate students who have not yet mastered or are in the process of mastering a discipline or disciplines. It focuses on junior-year students in the Whittier Scholars…

Understanding others' perceptions is a fundamental aspect of social cognition. Children's construal of visual perception is well investigated, but there is little work on children's understanding of others' auditory perception. The current study assesses toddlers' recognition that producing different sounds can affect others…

Empathy entails basic cognitive processes such as the recognition of facial expressions and basic emotional processes such as emotional contagion, but also higher-order cognitive processes such as abstract reasoning about the other person's emotional states and higher-order emotional processes such as empathic concern. Thus, empathy must be…