Outline
- Abstract
- Keywords
- Introduction
- Method
- Participants
- Materials and Procedure
- Past-to-Future Reasoning Task: Baseline Trials
- Past-to-Future Reasoning Task: Past Experience Trials
- Past-to-Future Reasoning Task: Coding and Scoring
- Inhibitory Control
- Working Memory
- General Procedure
- Results
- Mental State Triads
- Mental State Dyads
- Decision Breaks
- Working Memory and Inhibitory Control
- Discussion
- Age-Related Changes
- Effects of Past Experience Information
- Sex Differences
- Contributions of Executive Function
- Clinical Implications
- Limitations and Future Directions
- Conclusions
- Acknowledgments
- References
رئوس مطالب
- چکیده
- کلید واژه ها
- مقدمه
- روش کار
- شرکت کنندگان
- مواد و روش کار
- آزمون استدلال گذشته تا آینده: آزمایشات پایه
- آزمون استدلال گذشته تا آینده: آزمایشات تجارب گذشته
- آزمون استدلال گذشته تا آینده: کدگذاری و امتیاز دهی
- کنترل مهاری
- حافظه کاری
- روش کلی
- نتایج
- حالات سه گانه ذهن
- حالات ذهنی دوگانه
- نقض یا شکست در تصمیم گیری
- حافظه کاری و کنترل مهاری
- بحث
- تغییرات مرتبط با سن
- تاثیر اطلاعات تجارب گذشته
- تفاوت های جنسیتی
- سهم عملکرد های اجرایی
- مفاهیم بالینی
- محدودیت ها و جهت های آینده
- نتیجه گیری
Abstract
The current study examined 4- to 10-year-olds’ and adults’ (N = 280) tendency to connect people’s thoughts, emotions, and decisions into valence-matched mental state triads (thought valence = emotion valence = decision valence; e.g., anticipate something bad + feel worried + avoid) and valence-matched mental state dyads (thought–emotion, thought–decision, and emotion–decision). Participants heard vignettes about focal characters who re-encountered individuals who had previously harmed them twice, helped them twice, or both harmed and helped them. Baseline trials involved no past experience. Children and adults predicted the focal characters’ thoughts (anticipate something good or bad), emotions (feel happy or worried), and decisions (go near or stay away). Results showed significant increases between 4 and 10 years of age in the formation of valence-matched mental state triads and dyads, with thoughts and emotions most often aligned by valence. We also documented age-related improvement in awareness that uncertain situations elicit less valence-consistent mental states than more certain situations, with females expecting weaker coherence among characters’ thoughts, emotions, and decisions than males. Controlling for age and sex, individuals with stronger executive function (working memory and inhibitory control) predicted more valence-aligned mental states. These findings add to the emerging literature on development and individual differences in children’s reasoning about mental states and emotions during middle childhood and beyond.
Keywords: Emotion understanding - Executive function - Individual differences - Middle childhood - Sex differences - Theory of mindConclusions
The current data expand ToM research by examining children’s and adults’ reasoning about the triadic coherence of thoughts, emotions, and decisions. We demonstrated significant increases between 4 and 10 years of age in anticipating valence alignment among these mental states; thinking negatively evokes worry and avoidant decisions, whereas positive thoughts lead to happiness and approach decisions. Children and adults expected thoughts and emotions to cohere by valence more often than thoughts with decisions or emotions with decisions. Across age, individuals with superior WM and IC provided more valence-matched mental state triads, indicating that EF continues to aid ToM during middle childhood and adulthood.
These findings suggest that the ability to form valence-matched mental state triads improves with age and development in EF. Although true, there is more to this story than documenting further ‘‘advances” or ‘‘improvements” in ToM. What also changes with age is children’s awareness of the kinds of contexts where people’s mental states should be more versus less coherent. Children older than 6 years and adults judged that thoughts, emotions, and decisions would more often align by valence when a person encounters individuals who had treated them consistently in the past versus acted inconsistently or were unfamiliar. Moreover, across age, females expected less coherence by valence than males in how people will think, feel, and act (e.g., happiness or positive thoughts could still lead to avoidance). Thus, the ‘‘correct” answer is not always a valence-matched mental triad, and broken triads can result from different causes. For example, one child may break a triad due to less developed EF skills, another child due to lack of conceptual understanding, and still another child because he or she has formed different beliefs about when or if mental states will cohere. We raise these issues because as researchers start to investigate more complex features of ToM during middle childhood and beyond, the typical ‘‘present versus absent” paradigm will not be sufficient (e.g., at what age does a child understand false belief?). Once children have developed solid knowledge that people have desires, beliefs, thoughts, emotions, and the like, what likely evolves with age and further life experiences are intuitions about the sources, contents, interconnections, and consequences of those mental states.