Previous research on children's knowledge about the mind has primarily focused on their comprehension of false beliefs, leaving the conceptualization of thoughts and thinking less explored. To address this gap, we developed a new assessment tool, the interview about the mind (IaM), to assess children's understanding of the mind. Two studies…

This study examined the effect of dialogic reading intervention on improving the theory of mind of rural Chinese children. A 12-week-randomized controlled trial design with two intervention groups, i.e. school practice intervention (SPI), parent-involved intervention (PII), and one control group with traditional reading intervention (TRI) that…

Understanding emotions based on false beliefs is a necessary component of theory of mind. Previous research has indicated a lag in children's understanding of belief-based emotions as compared to false beliefs. Experiment 1 involved 83 Chinese 3- to 5-year-old children who were tested for the developmental change of the belief-emotion lag.…

Theory of mind (ToM) is crucial for social interactions. Previous research has indicated that deaf and hard-of-hearing children born into hearing families (DoH) are at risk of delayed ToM development. However, it is unclear whether this is the case for DoH children who receive cochlear implants (CIs) before and around the second year of life. The…

The metarepresentational aspect of early pretend play (make-believe activities where children create or participate in creating a new situation different from a real one) has been theoretically debated. In the present longitudinal study of N = 83 children, we tested for predictive relations of shared attention at 12-18 months, implicit false…

Previous studies have suggested that parents may support the development of theory of mind (ToM) in their child by talking about mental states (mental state talk; MST). However, MST has not been sufficiently explored in deaf children with cochlear implants (CIs). This study investigated ToM and availability of parental MST in deaf children with…

Learning to write is a complex process involving linguistic, cognitive, and socio-emotional factors. From a developmental perspective, little research has explored the content of young children's writings in terms of specific cognitive skills such as Theory of Mind (TOM). This study explores how young children's writing may foster representations…

When do children acquire a meta-representational Theory of Mind? False Belief (FB) tasks have become the litmus test to answer this question. In such tasks, subjects must ascribe a non-veridical belief to another agent and predict/explain her actions accordingly. Empirically, children pass explicit verbal versions of FB tasks from around age 4.…

This study assessed children's (N = 236) ability to introspect the mental states of "seeing" and "knowing" relative to their ability to attribute each state to others. Children could introspect "seeing" 10 months before they could introspect "knowing." Two- and 3-year-olds correctly reported their own…

In a longitudinal study (N = 54), we investigated the developmental relation between children's implicit and explicit theory of mind and executive functions. We found that implicit false belief understanding at 18 months was correlated with explicit false belief understanding at 4 to 5 years of age, with the latter being closely related to…

This study aimed to investigate the role of theory of mind (ToM) and both cool and hot executive function (EF) in accounting for prosocial behavior. Typically developing children of 3 to 6 years of age (N = 183) were assessed on a battery of EF and ToM tasks, while parents and teachers completed a questionnaire examining the children's prosocial…

Representational theory of mind--the ability to represent others' mental states and understand that these beliefs can be different from one's own and reality--emerges in early childhood alongside other meta-representational abilities, such as understanding that an image can be perceived in multiple ways. Limited research has suggested that…

Recent evidence showed that it is possible to help children's Theory of Mind (ToM) development during preschool and middle childhood. This study aimed to promote advanced mentalizing skills in children attending Year 2 of primary school through a ToM training programme based on narratives followed by multiple-choice questions and conversations…

The aim of this study was to test the relationship of theory of mind (ToM) and maternal emotional expressiveness with children's aggressive behaviours (i.e., relational aggression, physical aggression). ToM is vital to relational aggression, which involves harming others through purposeful manipulation and damaging peer relationships. However,…

Mental state terms are believed to be closely related to the development of Theory of Mind (ToM). This study focuses on mental state verbs (MSVs) and investigates how they are used by Japanese-speaking mother-child dyads compared to their English-speaking counterparts. Analyses of their spontaneous speech from the CHILDES archives show that…