Citation

Wright BC, Mahfoud J. Scand. J. Psychol. 2014; 55(1): 17-25.

Affiliation

Brunel University of London, School of Social Sciences, Middlesex, UK.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2014, Scandinavian Psychological Associations, Publisher John Wiley and Sons)

DOI

10.1111/sjop.12085

PMID

24303951

Abstract

Many accounts of children's Theory of Mind (ToM) development favor a cognitive explanation, for example, in terms of mental representational improvements at or before 4 years. Here, we investigated whether social factors as rated by a child's teacher, are related to ToM development. We tested 82 children of 3-6 years on each of four ToM tasks, and their class teacher completed a social questionnaire about each child's playing behavior, sharing, talkativeness, confidence, aggressiveness and outgoingness. A measure of task memory and the child's gender were also recorded. Here, children generally passed ToM tasks after 5 years-old, but no one gender performed reliably better than the other. Teacher-rated confidence and playing behavior were correlated to ToM. But in a regression analysis, these were replaced by teacher-rated talkativeness; with age and memory given primacy in both sets of analyses. It is concluded that maturation and cognitive factors may well have primacy but social factors, facilitated during early primary education, must also be given a role in ToM development.

Language: en