Self-awareness moderates the relation between maternal mental state language about desires and children's mental state vocabulary

A pilot evaluation of the Building Early Emotional Skills (BEES) curriculum in face-to-face and online formats

The Building Early Emotional Skills (BEES) parenting program is designed to promote parent-child relationships and more optimal social-emotional development by addressing four sequentially built skills in parenting infants/toddlers: (1) building parental awareness of emotions in self and child; (2) listening and interacting sensitively; (3) identifying and labeling emotions; and (4) intentionally supporting early self-regulation skills. BEES used an 8-session format delivered in online or face-to-face platforms (N = 264 female caregivers; n = 214 online, n = 50 face-to-face). Linear mixed modeling for pre-to-post changes showed significant increases in knowledge, emotion coaching beliefs, acceptance of negative emotions, and self-reported emotionally supportive responses to emotions; and, significant decreases in rejection of emotions, emotionally unsupportive responses, and parenting distress. Results suggested no differences in rate of change by program delivery type. Caregivers with more depressive symptoms showed greater improvement in their parenting distress. The BEES program may be a tool to support early positive parenting.

Theory of mind development: State of the science and future directions

This chapter offers a brief overview of how research on theory of mind development has developed over the recent years, with a focus on current research and theoretical accounts of theory of mind during the infancy period. The topics covered include the factors contributing to individual differences in theory of mind skills in preschoolers, the current replication crisis in theory of mind in infancy, the stability of theory of mind from infancy to childhood, and recent research suggesting that infants' concept of false belief is, at best, immature (e.g., overattribution to inanimate agents). Future directions in theory of mind research are suggested.

Keeping cultural in cultural evolutionary psychology: Culture shapes indigenous psychologies in specific ecologies

In Cognitive Gadgets, Heyes seeks to unite evolutionary psychology with cultural evolutionary theory. Although we applaud this unifying effort, we find it falls short of considering how culture itself evolves to produce indigenous psychologies fitted to particular environments. We focus on mentalizing and autobiographical memory as examples of how socialization practices embedded within culture build cognitive adaptations.

Mother–child conversation and social understanding in Pakistan

Two studies are presented to examine whether and why 3–5-year-olds in Pakistan display limited social understanding. Study 1 tested 71 preschoolers on Lillard and Flavell’s (1992) test of desires, pretence and beliefs, plus two false belief tasks, and showed very limited understanding across these measures even though almost half were over 5 years old. Study 2 replicated this effect with 35 preschoolers, and also conducted home observations of mother–child interaction at two time points. It tested three competing explanations of the role of adult-conversation in the preschooler’s developing understanding of the mind: the quality of the caregiver’s references to mental states, the child’s grasp of mental state language in such conversations, and the connectedness of adult–child talk. These factors are usually highly correlated in Western cultures. In Pakistan, with a delay in the acquisition of social understanding skills, Study 2 showed that maternal and child references to mental states were rare (2% of maternal and 1% of child utterances). Analyses of the relationship between mother–child conversation and the children’s test performance suggested that the measures of social understanding were not predicted uniquely by the connectedness of talk within the dyad, or maternal use of mental state terms. However, the children’s concurrent (and to a lesser extent previous) use of mental state terms was related to their grasp of mental states. Thus, the data support previous analyses, which suggests that the child’s construction of mental state terms is more crucial in their grasp of the social world.

Rethinking the Relationship between Social Experience and False-Belief Understanding: A Mentalistic Account

It was long assumed that the capacity to represent false beliefs did not emerge until at least age four, as evidenced by children's performance on elicited-response tasks. However, recent evidence that infants appear to demonstrate false-belief understanding when tested with alternative, non-elicited-response measures has led some researchers to conclude that the capacity to represent beliefs emerges in the 1st year of life. This mentalistic view has been criticized for failing to offer an explanation for the well-established positive associations between social factors and preschoolers' performance on elicited-response false-belief tasks. In this paper, we address this criticism by offering an account that reconciles these associations with the mentalistic claim that false-belief understanding emerges in infancy. We propose that rather than facilitating the emergence of the capacity to represent beliefs, social factors facilitate the use of this ability via effects on attention, inference, retrieval, and response production. Our account predicts that the relationship between social factors and false-belief understanding should not be specific to preschoolers' performance in elicited-response tasks: this relationship should be apparent across the lifespan in a variety of paradigms. We review an accumulating body of evidence that supports this prediction.