Beyond Sally's missing marble: further development in children's understanding of mind and emotion in middle childhood.
Research on the development of theory of mind (ToM), the understanding of people in relation to mental states and emotions, has been a vibrant area of cognitive development research. Because the dominant focus has been addressing when children acquire a ToM, researchers have concentrated their efforts on studying the emergence of psychological understanding during infancy and early childhood. Here, the benchmark test has been the false-belief task, the awareness that the mind can misrepresent reality. While understanding false belief is a critical milestone achieved by the age of 4 or 5, children make further advances in their knowledge about mental states and emotions during middle childhood and beyond. Thus, a comprehensive understanding of children's sociocognitive abilities in older age groups is necessary to understand more fully the course of ToM development. The aim of this review is to outline continued development in ToM during middle childhood. In particular, we focus on children's understanding of interpretation-that different minds can construct different interpretations of the same reality. Additionally, we consider children's growing understanding of how mental states (thoughts, emotions, decisions) derive from personal experiences, cohere across time, and interconnect (e.g., thoughts shape emotions). We close with a discussion of the surprising paucity of studies investigating individual differences in ToM beyond age 6. Our hope is that this chapter will invigorate empirical interest in moving the pendulum toward the opposite research direction-toward exploring strengths, limitations, variability, and persistent errors in developing theories of mind across the life span.
Department of Psychology and Center for Mind and Brain, University of California, Davis, California, USA. Electronic address: khlaga@ucdavis.edu.
Kristin Hansen
KH
Lagattuta
Department of Psychology and Center for Mind and Brain, University of California, Davis, California, USA.
Hannah J
HJ
Kramer
Department of Psychology and Center for Mind and Brain, University of California, Davis, California, USA.
Katie
K
Kennedy
Department of Psychology and Center for Mind and Brain, University of California, Davis, California, USA.
Karen
K
Hjortsvang
Department of Psychology and Center for Mind and Brain, University of California, Davis, California, USA.
Deborah
D
Goldfarb
Department of Psychology and Center for Mind and Brain, University of California, Davis, California, USA.
Sarah
S
Tashjian
D002648:Child; D002657:Child Development; D004644:Emotions; D056344:Executive Function; D006801:Humans; D007206:Individuality; D012938:Social Perception; D056345:Theory of Mind
Cognitive development; Emotion understanding; Executive function; Individual differences; Interpretation; Interpretive diversity; Middle childhood; Social cognition; Theory of mind