Theory of Mind, Emotion Understanding, Language, and Family Background: Individual Differences and Interrelations

TLDR

The study assessed 128 urban preschoolers’ false‑belief and emotion understanding, language skills, and family background through comprehensive testing and parent interviews. False‑belief and emotion understanding were linked to language ability and specific family background factors, but only family background uniquely predicted false‑belief, indicating distinct developmental pathways for these social cognition domains.

Abstract

Individual differences in young children's social cognition were examined in 128 urban preschoolers from a wide range of backgrounds. Comprehensive assessments were made of children's false‐belief understanding, emotion understanding, language abilities, and family background information was collected via parent interview. Individual differences in children's understanding of false‐belief and emotion were associated with differences in language ability and with certain aspects of family background, in particular, parental occupational class and mothers' education. The number of siblings that children had did not relate to their social cognition. Individual differences in false‐belief and emotion understanding were correlated, but these domains did not contribute to each other independently of age, language ability, and family background. In fact, variance in family background only contributed uniquely to false‐belief understanding. The results suggest that family background has a significant impact on the development of theory of mind. The findings also suggest that understanding of false‐belief and understanding of emotion may be distinct aspects of social cognition in young children.