There are two broad views of children's theory of mind. The mentalist view is that it emerges in infancy and is possibly innate. The minimalist view is that it emerges more gradually in childhood and is heavily dependent on learning. According to minimalism, children initially understand behaviors rather than mental states, and they are assisted…

The relation between children's guilt proneness and theory of mind (???) was examined in children (? = 96) aged 7- to 11-years. Guilt proneness was assessed with a self-report scenario-based measure and ToM was examined with a battery of first-order and second-order mental-state tasks. Hierarchical regression analysis revealed that second-order,…

Adults conceptualize God as particularly knowledgeable -- more knowledgeable than humans -- about moral transgressions. We investigated how younger (4- to 5-year-old) and older (6- to 7-year-old) children view God's moral knowledge. Cultural narratives in the United States portray God as omniscient, which could lead children growing up in the…

Autobiographical memory (AM) is a socially-relevant cognitive skill. Little is known regarding AM during early childhood in ASD. Parent-child reminiscing conversations predict AM in non-ASD populations but have rarely been examined in autism. To address this gap, 17 preschool-aged children (ages 4-6 years) with ASD and 21 children without ASD…

We investigated whether preschoolers' social-emotional competencies predict their peer relationships and academic achievements during grade one. Measures of cool and hot executive functions, theory of mind, social-problem-solving, and peer acceptance were administered to a sample of 48 preschoolers (M = 77.91 months). Academic achievement and peer…

Two studies are presented to examine whether and why 3-5-year-olds in Pakistan display limited social understanding. Study 1 tested 71 preschoolers on Lillard and Flavell's (1992) test of desires, pretence and beliefs, plus two false belief tasks, and showed very limited understanding across these measures even though almost half were over 5 years…

Literature has shown the importance of social cognition for emotional wellness. However, to our knowledge, few studies so far investigated the relationship between social cognition and anxiety in childhood. No study systematically examined social cognition in relation to specific domains of anxiety. By a correlational design and multivariate…

This study investigated the prospective relationship between preschoolers' theory of mind (ToM) skills and academic school readiness, while exploring the possible moderator role played by child gender. The participants were 75 children who were assessed at two time points: when enrolled in the second preschool year (T1) and again 4 months before…

Background: Many children with neurodevelopmental disorders such as autism spectrum disorder (ASD), attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) or developmental language disorder (DLD) have difficulty recognizing and understanding emotions. However, the reasons for these difficulties are currently not well understood. Aims: To compare the…

Advanced theory-of-mind (AToM) development was investigated in three separate studies involving 82, 466, and 402 elementary school children (8-, 9-, and 10-year-olds). Rasch and factor analyses assessed whether common conceptual development underlies higher-order false-belief understanding, social understanding, emotion recognition, and…

Cross-cultural research on children's theory of mind (ToM) understanding has raised questions about its developmental sequence and relationship with executive function (EF). The current study examined how ToM develops (using the tasks from Wellman & Liu, 2004) in relation to 2 EF skills (conflict inhibition, working memory) in 997 Chinese…

Bilingual children often show advanced executive functioning (EF) and false belief (FB) understanding compared to monolinguals. The latter has been attributed to their enhanced inhibitory control EF, although this has only been examined in a single study which did not confirm this hypothesis. The current study examined the relation of EF and…

This investigation was aimed at studying the relations between executive functions (EFs) and categorical emotion understanding while controlling for preschoolers' IQ, language ability and theory of mind (ToM). Specifically, we wanted to analyse the association between emotion understanding and set shifting, due to the lack of studies with this EF.…

Twenty-four 3.5-year-old children who initially showed poor performance on false-belief tasks participated in a training protocol designed to promote performance on these tasks. Our aim was to determine whether the extent to which children benefited from training was predicted by their performance on a battery of executive functioning tasks.…

Research Findings: The present cross-sectional study investigated the question of whether 6 different temperament dimensions (inhibition to novelty, social orientation, motor activity, positive emotionality, negative emotionality, and attention) influenced cognitive and affective theory of mind (ToM) in 168 children (86 three/four-year-olds and 82…