Theory of Mind in Middle Childhood and Adolescence

Integrating Multiple Perspectives

Rory T. Devine, Serena Lecce, Rory T. Devine, Serena Lecce

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000390117
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

This landmark text integrates diverse perspectives on how humans understand others' minds (or 'theory of mind') beyond early childhood into middle childhood and adolescence. It explores how the neural, cognitive, and social changes of middle childhood and adolescence shape the ongoing development of theory of mind, and how theory of mind helps children navigate their lives.

Drawing on cutting-edge research from leading international experts, this book provides a survey and analysis of the current state and future direction of the field. It is organized around three themes relating to the key issues in contemporary research. The first part focuses on the biological and cognitive bases of theory of mind in middle childhood and adolescence. The second part goes on to explore the social predictors and consequences, considering how theory of mind is shaped by social experiences and, in turn, impacts children's social lives in middle childhood and adolescence. Finally, the third part focuses on theory of mind in the context of neurodiversity, disability, and youth mental health in middle childhood and adolescence.

Offering in-depth understanding for all students and scholars of developmental and cognitive psychology, neuroscience, clinical psychology and psychiatry, and education, this valuable text also identifies an agenda for future scholarship on this exciting topic.

Part I

Cognitive and biological underpinnings

1 Advanced theory of mind in middle childhood and adulthood

Inferring mental states and emotions from life history

Kristin Hansen Lagattuta and Hannah J. Kramer

Children’s understanding of their own and others’ mental states (e.g., desires, preferences, emotions, beliefs, and thoughts), or ‘theory of mind’, undergoes significant development from infancy through early childhood. By their fifth birthday, if not earlier, most typically developing children understand quite a lot about minds and connections between minds and the world. For example, they know that people can differ in their desires, preferences, and emotions; they understand that emotions can derive from both situational and mental causes; and they can predict and explain individuals’ beliefs, even when those beliefs are false (Kramer & Lagattuta, in press; Wellman, 2014). Despite these remarkable achievements, there is still much to learn. Being a competent interpreter and perspective-taker of the what (e.g., what is someone thinking about?) and why (e.g., why are they having those thoughts?) of mental states, as well as appreciating the interconnectedness among different mental states and life experiences (e.g., how will this past experience bias future mental states? How do thoughts affect emotions?) is no simple feat. There are intriguing setbacks along this developmental path, with even adults committing mindreading errors (Epley et al., 2004; Todd et al., 2011). Indeed, the recognition that children do not ‘achieve’ a fully mature theory of mind once they pass a basic false belief task has gained increasing momentum in recent years, motivating developmental scientists (many contributing to the current volume) to investigate further progress in theory of mind during middle childhood and beyond (Devine et al., 2016; Lecce et al., 2014; Wang et al., 2016).

In this chapter, we draw primarily from our own research on advanced theory of mind, particularly studies on children’s and adults’ causal reasoning about how people’s life events affect their current and future emotions, thoughts, and decisions, as well as contribute to potential diversity in how individuals interpret the same situation. We also consider children’s and adults’ beliefs about mental state connections, including desire–emotion, thought–emotion, and expectation–emotion, as well as their inferences about valence cohesion among people’s emotions, thoughts, and decisions. Although we emphasize age-related changes, we also discuss sources of individual differences. We conclude with ideas for future research. Our overall approach has been to delineate developmental progression in explicit mental state reasoning by designing tasks that, although age-appropriate, purposely challenge children’s and adults’ thinking about the inherent complexity of people’s lives and minds (for further reviews, see Kramer & Lagattuta, in press; Lagattuta, 2014, 2018; Lagattuta et al., 2014a, 2015; Lagattuta & Weller, 2014).

The impact of past events on future mental states

Prior life events bias future mental states: What a person has experienced – the good, the bad, and the more mundane – can influence how they feel, think, and make decisions later in time (Karniol & Ross, 1996; Morewedge et al., 2005). Indeed, essential clues as to the what (e.g., what is Mary thinking about? Why is Mary sad?) and why (e.g., why is she having those thoughts and feelings?) of an individual’s internal mental states can be gleaned by considering what has happened to them previously. This ‘life history theory of mind’ (i.e., the knowledge that variations in life events can bias people’s future mental states; Lagattuta et al., 2018) follows an extended developmental trajectory. Although there are foundations in early childhood, improvements continue through middle childhood and into adulthood.

Thinking about the past

In initial tests of this knowledge, Lagattuta and colleagues (1997) presented three- to six-year-olds with scenarios featuring characters who experienced a negative event (e.g., Brian feels sad after a yellow car crashes into his parked bicycle), and then a few days later, re-experienced the negative emotion after seeing a reminder of that past event (e.g., the yellow car). Across three studies, results showed significant increases between three and six years in explaining characters’ current negative emotions as caused by thinking about the past, with only six-year-olds consistently linking the cause of the thoughts to the visual cue (e.g., ‘Brian feels sad because the car reminds him about it’). In contrast, younger children often explained that people remembered the past because ‘they wanted to’ or ‘liked to’, failing to recognize that thoughts can be triggered uncontrollably and without intention (see also Davis et al., 2010; Flavell & Green, 1999). Further extensions by Lagattuta and Wellman (2001) clarified that young children first reliably exhibit knowledge about emotions caused by past-oriented thoughts when explaining negative emotions that are atypical or mismatch current events. Not until age six did children consistently explain positive emotions (typical and atypical), typical negative emotions, and behaviors as caused by remembering the past.

Anticipating the future

Past events not only carry weight over time by creating the potential for remembering the past, but they also influence people’s anticipations about what will happen next. Indeed, some scientists have proposed that the fundamental purpose of memory is its utility for imagining the future (Schacter et al., 2007; Suddendorf & Corballis, 2007). In Lagattuta (2007), three- to six-year-olds and adults learned about characters who experienced a single negative event (e.g., David feels sad after a red-haired boy stole his toy) and many days later felt worried or made a preventative decision (e.g., hid toys) after seeing that same perpetrator or someone who looked highly similar. Of central interest was the frequency that participants explained characters’ current emotions or decisions as caused by thinking a negative event would occur in the future because of the past (e.g., ‘Because he thinks the boy will do something bad because he’s done bad things before’). Participants age five and older, compared to three- and four-year-olds, more consistently provided these past-to-future explanations. When task difficulty increased (also in Lagattuta, 2007) by requiring participants to first predict and then explain emotions, significant differences emerged between childhood and adulthood. Adults exhibited stronger awareness of the biasing impact of the past on characters’ future-oriented mental states as well as the individuated nature of these thoughts and emotions – naïve others would not feel worried due to lack of experience or knowledge about the past. Note that these age differences emerged despite multiple controls in place to verify story comprehension, eliminate memory demands, and scaffold incomplete verbal responses.

Integrating multiple past events

Clearly, a person’s life history is far more complex than a single episode. Individuals often have multiple encounters with the same agent, and not all of them are consistent in valence. Thus, we reasoned that further growth in awareness of connections between life experience and mind would likely involve learning how to integrate and weight multiple past events to infer people’s mental states. To test this, Lagattuta and Sayfan (2013) presented four- to ten-year-olds and adults with illustrated trials, each featuring a focal character who had two prior experiences with the same perpetrator: Two negative (NN), two positive (PP), a negative followed by a positive (NP), or a positive followed by a negative (PN). Participants predicted how the focal character would feel (happy versus worried, including intensity), think (something good versus bad will happen, including likelihood), and decide (approach versus avoid the perpetrator, including proximity) when re-encountering that agent again. To gain deeper insight into how children and adults prioritized different kinds of past experiences (negative versus positive; initial versus recent past), we used eye-tracking to measure visual attention to past event pictures while participants made mental state judgments. Pilot testing was conducted to equate negative and positive past events in emotional intensity and visual interest, and we included control questions to verify comprehension.

Results showed that children as young as four to five years of age understand that people’s past experiences with a particular agent will shape how they later feel, think, and make decisions when seeing that same agent. All age groups attributed significantly more intense positive emotions, thoughts, and decisions for PP > NP > PN > NN pasts. With age, participants inferred a stronger impact of past experience on future mental states (e.g., more intensely negative mental states for NN and PN pasts); thus, differentiation in mental state judgments by past widened during middle childhood and into adulthood. The prioritization of the recent past in mixed-valence trials also appeared in visual attention. PN pasts elicited a recency attention bias (i.e., greater looking to the negative versus positive past event), which magnified with age. Only adults exhibited a recency attention bias for NP pasts. Visual attention also correlated with reasoning: Participants with greater biased attention to the negative event in PN pasts predicted that characters would feel more intensely worried, anticipate a higher likelihood of harm, and make more extreme avoidant decisions; likewise, a greater emphasis on recency in NP pasts correlated with more positive emotion, thought, and decision judgments. Although prior research has shown that children and adults look most at information they find meaningful in a visual scene (Henderson & Hayes, 2017; Lagattuta & Kramer, 2017; Wolfe & Horowitz, 2017), this was the first evidence that researchers can predict semantic judgments based on visual attention. That is, the attention biases appeared to capture aspects of how individuals were actually thinking about the relative importance and future impact of different past events.

Understanding direct connections between past experience and future mental states, however, is conceptually simpler than the awareness that life events can bias how a person feels, thinks, and make decisions across a wide range of future circumstances. That is, humans regularly generalize to new situations that share some similarity to the past (Dunsmoor & Murphy, 2015; Lindquist, 2013; Lerner et al., 2015; Strack & Deutsch, 2004; Wyer et al., 2012). To test children’s understanding that past events can influence mental states even when meeting unknown agents, Lagattuta and Kramer (2019) made a critical change to Lagattuta and Sayfan (2013). Instead of the same perpetrator re-appearing in the final scene, it was an agent who looked highly similar to the one from the past. This similar-looking agent was repeatedly marked as ‘new’ and ‘never seen before’. We reasoned that these changes would expose weaknesses or gaps in young children’s understanding. Although eye-tracking data confirmed that four- to five-year-olds looked to past events when reasoning about characters’ reactions to someone new, this age group discounted the relevance of that information and predicted that characters would have positive emotions, thoughts, and decisions regardless of the past (PP = NP = PN = NN). Adults, in contrast, presumed the same hierarchical judgment pattern (albeit more tempered in intensity) as when the same exact perpetrator returned (i.e., more positive mental state forecasts for PP > NP > PN > NN pasts). Between the ages of six and ten, children moved closer ...