We examined Turkish participants’ mindreading accuracy toward ingroup versus outgroup targets. Three hundred and fifty-four Turkish participants were randomly assigned to one of three target groups: Turkish, Syrian, or Norwegian. The mindreading accuracy for these targets was measured along with the perceived cultural similarity of the target to the ingroup, as well as prejudice and threat perception. Participants evidenced higher mindreading accuracy toward Turkish targets compared with Syrian and Norwegian targets. Mindreading accuracy for the Syrian and Norwegian targets did not differ, but lower perceived similarity to the Turkish ingroup significantly predicted lower mentalizing for Syrian and Norwegians. In the Syrian target group, lower perceived similarity interacted with lower education and higher prejudice, resulting in a further reduction in mindreading. For Norwegian targets, lower similarity impaired mindreading through an interaction with higher threat perception. Results indicate that even when mentalizing capacity is mature, intergroup factors are linked with the deployment of mindreading.

Parenting by lying—a practice whereby parents lie to their children as a means of emotional or behavioral control—is common throughout the world. This study expands upon the existing, albeit limited, research on parenting by lying by exploring the prevalence and long-term associations of this parenting practice in Turkey. Turkish university students (N = 182) retrospectively reported on their experiences of parenting by lying in childhood, their current frequency of lying towards parents, their present level of psychosocial adjustment problems, and their expression of psychopathic traits. The results found that recalling higher levels of parenting by lying in childhood was significantly and positively associated with both increased lying to parents as well as the expression of secondary psychopathic traits in adulthood. The novel findings uncovered in this paper highlight the potential long-term associations that parental lying to children may have on their psychosocial development in adulthood.

Objectives Research examining disruptive behaviors in clinical groups of preschool and school-aged children has consistently revealed significant difficulties in their emotion knowledge and empathy but intact performance in their theory-ofmind (ToM). However, it is largely not known if these difficulties in emotion knowledge and empathy as opposed to ToM are specific to extreme forms of disruption in clinical groups or rather represent broad deficiencies related to disruptive behaviors in general, including the milder levels exhibited by typically developing children. Milder disruptive behaviors (e.g., whining, arguing, rule-breaking and fighting) in peer contexts might relate to normative variations in socio-cognitive and emotional skills like ToM, emotion knowledge and empathy. To illuminate whether the same pattern of relations observed in clinical samples would arise in typical development, this study aims to examine the role of ToM, emotion knowledge and empathy in typically developing preschoolers' disruptive behaviors. Methods We used individual tasks to measure 116 typically developing Turkish preschoolers' ToM, emotion knowledge (understanding anger and sadness) and empathy for pain, and received mothers' reports about children's levels of disruptive behavior in peer contexts. Results Path analysis showed that among these skills, it was only empathy which predicted disruptive behaviors significantly (β = −0.25, p < 0.05). Understanding sadness predicted higher empathy (β = 0.18, p < 0.05) and higher empathy predicted lower disruptive behaviors, but the mediation of empathy in the link between understanding sadness and disruptive behavior was not significant (β = −0.05, p > 0.05, 90% CI = −0.106, 0.001). Conclusions Overall, our results indicate that empathizing with others' emotions is more important than understanding their mental states and emotions for lower disruptive behaviors.

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