هماهنگی افکار، احساسات و تصمیم گیری و بررسی نظریه ذهن (ToM) در دوران کودکی

ABSTRACT How do thoughts, emotions, and decisions align? A new way to examine theory of mind during middle childhood and beyond

Children’s understanding of mental states and emotions, theory of mind (ToM), has been a core topic in cognitive development research for the past 30 years. Despite a rich foundation of studies on infants’ and preschoolers’ concepts about desires, emotions, and beliefs (see Wellman, 2014), less attention has been directed toward ToM improvements after 6 years of age, including sources of variability during middle childhood and beyond (Hughes & Devine, 2015; Lagattuta et al., 2015; Miller, 2012; Pillow, 2012). As reviewed in Lagattuta (2014), one such advance involves more complex reasoning about causal connections between mental states (e.g., how thoughts influence emotions). The current research expands this inquiry to consider development and individual differences in 4- to 10-year-olds’ and adults’ beliefs about triadic interrelations among thoughts, emotions, and decisions—for example, how thoughts elicit emotions as well as shape decisions. We focus on the thought–emotion–decision triad because it figures prominently in scientific theories of emotion, decision making, and clinical disorders, with interventions often aimed at helping individuals to recognize and change maladaptive relations among how they think, feel, and act (Baumeister, Vohs, DeWall, & Zhang, 2007; Borkovec, Ray, & Stober, 1998; Coricelli et al., 2005; Dolan, 2002; Ehlers & Clark, 2000; Ellis, 1991; Fredrickson, 2001; Lazarus, 1982; Wood, Quinn, & Kashy, 2002). Thus, this study informs basic research on ToM development during middle childhood and has implications for clinical practice.

Although children’s reasoning about triadic coherence among thoughts, emotions, and decisions has not been systematically investigated, researchers have done substantial work examining children’s understanding of each dyadic component: thought–emotion, emotion–decision, and thought–decision. Considering first thought–emotion relations, Lagattuta and colleagues (Lagattuta, 2007, 2014; Lagattuta & Wellman, 2001; Lagattuta, Wellman, & Flavell, 1997) found that between 3 and 6 years of age children exhibit greater awareness that thinking or being reminded about the past or the future can change current emotions. In addition, although 5- and 6-year-olds recognize that two people in the same situation will feel differently depending on the focus of their thoughts, older children better appreciate the power of positive thinking to improve emotions during negative events (Bamford & Lagattuta, 2012). Moreover, although children pass false belief tasks at around 4 or 5 years of age, they continue to struggle with understanding emotions caused by false beliefs until 6 or 7 years (see Harris, de Rosnay, & Ronfard, 2014). More generally, studies have documented improvement between 3 and 10 years of age in children’s understanding that thoughts shape emotional wellbeing as well as how emotional states affect how a person thinks (Altshuler & Ruble, 1989; Amsterlaw, Lagattuta, & Meltzoff, 2009; Bender, Pons, Harris, & de Rosnay, 2011; Flavell, Flavell, & Green, 2001; Harris, Johnson, Hutton, Andrews, & Cooke, 1989; Sayfan & Lagattuta, 2008, 2009).

Researchers have examined children’s understanding of emotion–decision relations in the context of morality, coping, and post-decision regret. For example, Lagattuta (2005) found that children aged 7 years and older better understand than younger children that willpower decisions (inhibiting desires to abide by rules) can be emotionally satisfying and that fulfilling desires by breaking rules can cause negative feelings (see also Arsenio, Gold, & Adams, 2006; Lagattuta, Nucci, & Bosacki, 2010; Lagattuta & Weller, 2014). There are also significant improvements between 5 and 7 years of age in recognizing that deciding to forgo personal desires to help others can have emotional benefits (Weller & Lagattuta, 2013, 2014). Relevant to how emotions affect coping decisions, Sayfan and Lagattuta (2009) demonstrated that children as young as 4 years understand that behavior choices, such as fight or flight, can be effective in reducing fear, with advances between 4 and 7 years in understanding more complex causal links between emotion and behavior (see also Bamford & Lagattuta, 2010; Harris, 1989). Children begin to report feeling regret at around 6 to 9 years of age (Beck & Riggs, 2014; O’Connor, McCormack, & Feeney, 2012; Rafetseder & Perner, 2012), and this emotion aids them in making more adaptive future decisions (O’Connor, McCormack, Beck, & Feeney, 2015; O’Connor, McCormack, & Feeney, 2014). Still, children exhibit more difficulty in reasoning about another’s regret than in reporting their own experience of it (Weisberg & Beck, 2010), further indicating that knowledge about emotion–decision connections continues to develop through middle childhood.

Finally, researchers have also investigated children’s reasoning about thought–decision relations. This has predominantly been tested using the classic false belief paradigm (Wimmer & Perner, 1983). In this task, one character places an object in a certain location and leaves, and then a second character moves that object. Participants are asked where the first character will look for the item. Individuals older than 4 or 5 years demonstrate understanding that a character will act on his or her beliefs even if they contrast with reality (see Wellman, Cross, & Watson, 2001). Lagattuta and colleagues (Lagattuta, 2007; Lagattuta & Wellman, 2001) took a different approach by examining children’s knowledge that people’s actions can be caused by thinking about the past or anticipating the future. Findings revealed improvements between 3 and 7 years of age in explaining decisions (e.g., quickly putting away a small pet) as caused by the content of people’s thoughts (e.g., thinking that a dog will repeat its chasing behavior from the past).

Based on the extant research, then, it appears that from 3 to 10 years of age children develop more sophisticated reasoning about relations between thoughts and emotions, between emotions and decisions, and between thoughts and decisions. To our knowledge, no previous work has explored how children combine all three mental states. Thus, to broaden the scope of ToM investigations during early and middle childhood, we examined development and individual differences in 4- to 10-year-olds’ and adults’ reasoning about these triadic interconnections. To do so, the current study took advantage of a dataset created by Lagattuta and Sayfan (2013). They presented children and adults with scenarios, each featuring target characters who encounter someone who previously harmed them (two negative events, NN), helped them (two positive events, PP), both harmed and helped them (NP and PN), or was unfamiliar (no past experience). Participants predicted whether the focal character would think that something good or bad would happen next (thought), would feel happy or worried (emotion), and would go near or stay away from the perpetrator (decision). Although all age groups made significant distinctions among trial types—for example, even 4- and 5-year-olds judged that characters would anticipate a higher likelihood of harm, feel more worried, and make more avoidant decisions in NN > PN > NP > PP trials—there were improvements between 4 and 10 years of age and between childhood and adulthood in the ability to integrate different kinds of past event information to predict future-oriented mental states.

Whereas Lagattuta and Sayfan (2013) analyzed predictions for characters’ thoughts, emotions, and decisions as separate dependent variables, we explored the extent to which participants aligned their three mental state judgments by valence. In doing so, the current project provides new insight into children’s and adults’ beliefs about causal interconnectedness or coherence among mental states. Thus, to be credited with providing a valence-matched mental state triad, a participant would need to predict either (a) that the character anticipates a negative future (negative thought), feels worried (negative emotion), and will avoid the perpetrator (negative decision) or (b) that the character anticipates a positive future (positive thought), feels happy (positive emotion), and will approach the perpetrator (positive decision). Given age-related improvements in reasoning about causal connections between different kinds of mental states, we predicted that the provision of valence matched mental state triads would increase between 4 and 10 years of age as well as between childhood and adulthood.

Because a mental state triad is composed of three interlocking dyads (thought–emotion, emotion– decision, and thought–decision), we further investigated which of these combinations children and adults expect to align most by valence. Although few studies have systematically compared children’s proficiency with different kinds of mental state dyads, evidence from Lagattuta and Wellman (2001) and Bartsch, Campbell, and Troseth (2007) suggests that thoughts and emotions may be viewed as more interconnected than decisions and thoughts or decisions and emotions. Moreover, although people’s thoughts and emotions typically align (Lazarus, 1982), it is not always straightforward how individuals will behave when experiencing certain thoughts and emotions; different people could reasonably decide to take different actions (e.g., fight vs. flight when experiencing stress; see Taylor et al., 2000). Thus, we expected participants across age to provide more valence-matched connections between thoughts and emotions compared with thought–decision or emotion–decision dyads.

As an additional layer, we examined whether the cohesion of children’s and adults’ triadic mental state judgments vary by the characters’ prior experiences. We hypothesized that trials featuring perpetrators who changed how they treated the focal character in the past (PN and NP) should elicit fewer valence-matched mental state triads and dyads than trials where perpetrators acted in consistent ways (NN and PP). That is, because the future is more uncertain in inconsistent-past trials than in consistent-past trials, participants should expect less alignment by valence in how characters will think, feel, and act. Given age-related improvements in identifying uncertain situations (Lagattuta & Sayfan, 2011, 2013; Lyons & Ghetti, 2011; Robinson, Rowley, Beck, Carroll, & Apperly, 2006), we anticipated that this distinction by trial type would widen with age. Two potential patterns for baseline trials (no past events) were equally plausible. On the one hand, this could be the easiest condition for forming valence-matched connections among thoughts, emotions, and decisions. With no past event information to integrate, children and adults could reasonably pick a valence (e.g., anticipate positive future) and stick with it for their other judgments (e.g., feel happy, approach). Alternatively, because there is no past information from which to draw, baseline trials are also uncertain (see Lagattuta & Sayfan, 2011). If uncertainty is the driving factor, then the valence consistency of mental state judgments for baseline trials should not differ from the inconsistent-past trials (NP and PN).

We include sex in our analyses because previous studies have found that girls outperform boys in some tasks involving reasoning about connections between mind and emotion starting as young as 3 or 4 years (see Lagattuta, 2014, for a review). During early childhood, girls also participate in more frequent mental state talk than boys (Hughes & Dunn, 1998), and they exhibit higher emotion understanding (Bosacki & Astington, 1999; Dunn, Brown, Slomkowski, Tesla, & Youngblade, 1991). Studies have also shown a female advantage in interpreting emotions and mental states during middle childhood (Banerjee, Watling, & Caputi, 2011; Calero, Salles, Semelman, & Sigman, 2013; Devine & Hughes, 2013). Given these findings, one might hypothesize that females will form more valence-matched mental state triads and dyads than males. Alternatively, prior research also indicates that female children and adults perceive the future as more uncertain than males (Lagattuta, 2007; Lagattuta & Sayfan, 2011). Thus, across age, females could predict future-oriented mental states to be less aligned than males because they view these relations in different ways. For example, even though a person might anticipate a positive future and feel happy, because there is room for doubt, the person may choose to avoid (a broken triad). Although Lagattuta and Sayfan (2013) found no sex differences when they analyzed thought, emotion, and decision judgments separately (see also Charman, Ruffman, & Clements, 2002, and Wellman et al., 2001, for no sex differences in ToM), potentially sex differences may emerge in how females versus males expect mental states to align. Therefore, sex was examined because the literature predicts several possible outcomes: females providing more valence-matched mental state judgments, males providing more valence-matched mental state judgments, or no sex differences.

Aside from examining the influence of age and sex on the ability to form valence-matched mental state triads and dyads, we also aimed to contribute to the small but growing literature on individual differences in ToM during middle childhood and older age groups. We focused on connections between ToM and executive function (EF, a number of interconnected higher order cognitive processes; Miyake et al., 2000) because inhibitory control (IC, the ability to stop automatic responses; Best & Miller, 2010) and working memory (WM, the ability to consider and manipulate pieces of information; Baddeley, 1992) predict variability in ToM during early childhood (see Devine & Hughes, 2014; Marcovitch et al., 2015). Much less is known about these relations in older children (see Hughes & Devine, 2015; Lagattuta et al., 2015). Lagattuta and colleagues recently demonstrated that even when controlling for age, individual differences in WM and IC predict more advanced ToM in 4- to 10-year-olds and adults (Kennedy, Lagattuta, & Sayfan, 2015; Lagattuta, Sayfan, & Blattman, 2010; Lagattuta, Sayfan, & Harvey, 2014). The current study aimed to test EF–ToM links across a wide age range using a different ToM task—this time examining the valence alignment of thought–emotion–decision judgments. We reasoned that participants would need to recruit EF skills to evaluate the impact of past event information as well as to track and coordinate the valence consistency of their mental state judgments.

In summary, the current study investigated 4- to 10-year-olds’ and adults’ reasoning about connections among future-oriented thoughts, emotions, and decisions—in particular, their formation of valence-matched mental state triads (anticipate positive future + feel happy + approach; anticipate negative future + feel worried + avoid) as well as dyads (thought–emotion, thought–decision, and emotion–decision). We further analyzed the impact of different kinds of past event information (consistent-past, inconsistent-past, and no past) on the valence alignment of children’s and adults’ mental state judgments. We expected age-related increases in connecting people’s thoughts, emotions, and decisions, with consistent-past trials (NN and PP) eliciting more coherent triads and dyads than inconsistent-past (PN and NP) and potentially baseline (no past event) trials. We explored relations between sex and performance. Finally, we expanded inquiry of ToM–EF links to examine whether children and adults with higher WM and IC provide more valence-coherent predictions about how people will think, feel, and act.