Young Children's Understanding of Other People's Feelings and Beliefs: Individual Differences and Their Antecedents

TLDR

The study followed 50 children from 33 to 40 months, observing home interactions with mother and sibling and later testing affective labeling, perspective-taking, and false-belief understanding. Children showed marked individual differences, with only about a third explaining actions via false belief and few predicting actions based on beliefs; these differences correlated with earlier family discourse about feelings and causality, verbal fluency, sibling cooperation, SES, and gender, supporting the idea that social discourse and family interactions foster social cognition development.

Abstract

Individual differences in young children's understanding of others' feelings and in their ability to explain human action in terms of beliefs, and the earlier correlates of these differences, were studied with 50 children observed at home with mother and sibling at 33 months, then tested at 40 months on affective-labeling, perspective-taking, and false-belief tasks. Individual differences in social understanding were marked; a third of the children offered explanations of actions in terms of false belief, though few predicted actions on the basis of beliefs. These differences were associated with participation in family discourse about feelings and causality 7 months earlier, verbal fluency of mother and child, and cooperative interaction with the sibling. Differences in understanding feelings were also associated with the discourse measures, the quality of mother-sibling interaction, SES, and gender, with girls more successful than boys. The results support the view that discourse about the social world may in part mediate the key conceptual advances reflected in the social cognition tasks; interaction between child and sibling and the relationships between other family members are also implicated in the growth of social understanding.