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Friday, 8:30 AM - 10:00 AM

Social Environments and Theory of Mind

Theory of mind (ToM) involves recognizing and understanding one’s own and other’s mental states comprising desires, knowledge and beliefs. Considering the pertinence of children’s social environment to ToM development from early to middle childhood, we present four investigations of how and why multifaceted environmental factors shape ToM understanding. Presentation 1 identifies qualitatively distinct environmental profiles in infancybased on indicators such as socioeconomic status, maternal mental health, and screen exposurethat contribute to ToM understanding in middle childhood. Presentation 2 further examines the underlying mechanisms of socioeconomic differences in preschool children’s false belief understanding, by investigating different roles of parents’ knowledge of child development and parents’ mental state language across various false belief tasks, including elicited-response, low-demand and the spontaneous-response tasks. To clarify cultural and linguistic differences in mental state talk, Presentation 3 examines parents’ bilingual mental state talk (i.e., English and Mandarin) and their associations with children’s bilingual mental state vocabulary and ToM development. Finally, Presentation 4 studies how manipulations of self-other distinctions and overlap may benefit ToM abilities in children with autism spectrum conditions, thus specifying cognitive processes to target in interventions that support socio-cognitive development. Together, we provide a multi-layer exploration of how and why social environments shape children’s theory of mind abilities while considering multidimensional environmental factors, proximal mechanisms, linguistic differences, and self-other cognitive processes. Directions for future work are highlighted to unravel the complex interplay between social environments and ToM development.

Paper #1
Title	Profiles of early environments and theory of mind in middle childhood: A latent profile analysis
Presenting author	Dr. Germaine Tng, Psychology Division, School of Social Sciences, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore

Paper #2
Title	Exploring the nature and cause of socioeconomic differences in false-belief performance
Presenting author	Rose M. Scott, Ph.D., Psychological Sciences, University of California, Merced, USA, United States

Paper #3
Title	Bilingual Parental Mental State Talk and Children’s Theory-of-Mind Development in Singapore
Presenting author	Dr. Xiao Pan Ding, Ph.D., Department of Psychology, National University of Singapore, Singapore, Singapore

Paper #4
Title	Effects of self-other distinction/overlap on theory of mind in children with autism spectrum conditions
Presenting author	Dr. Dan Jiang, Department of Psychology and Behavioral Sciences, Zhejiang University, China

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Session chair
Dr. Xiao Pan Ding, Ph.D., Department of Psychology, National University of Singapore, Singapore, Singapore

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