Developing an understanding of others’ emotional states: Relations among affective theory of mind and empathy measures in early childhood

Gallant, Caitlyn; Lavis, Lydia; Mahy, Caitlin E. V.

doi:10.1111/bjdp.12322

Cited by 24 publications

(20 citation statements)

References 43 publications

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“…Language was not an independent predictor of neurophysiological measures of FEP related skills in children aged 4–12 years. Despite previous behavioural findings implicating language and FEP ( Astington and Jenkins, 1999 ; Beck et al, 2012 ; Bigelow et al, 2021 ; Gallant et al, 2020 ), no main effect was found between language and neurophysiological measures of FEP. This indicates that any association with language is unlikely to be broadly linked to the early stages of FEP in children.…”

Section: Discussioncontrasting

confidence: 93%

Facial emotion processing and language during early-to-middle childhood development: An event related potential study

Bigelow

Clark

Lum

et al. 2022

Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience

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Facial emotion processing (FEP) is critical to social cognitive ability. Developmentally, FEP rapidly improves in early childhood and continues to be fine-tuned throughout middle childhood and into adolescence. Previous research has suggested that language plays a role in the development of social cognitive skills, including non-verbal emotion recognition tasks. Here we investigated whether language is associated with specific neurophysiological indicators of FEP. One hundred and fourteen children (4–12 years) completed a language assessment and a FEP task including stimuli depicting anger, happiness, fear, and neutrality. EEG was used to record key event related potentials (ERPs; P100, N170, LPP at occipital and parietal sites separately) previously shown to be sensitive to faces and facial emotion. While there were no main effects of language, the P100 latency to negative expressions appeared to increase with language, while LPP amplitude increased with language for negative and neutral expressions. These findings suggest that language is linked to some early physiological indicators of FEP, but this is dependent on the facial expression. Future studies should explore the role of language in later stages of neural processing, with a focus on processes localised to ventromedial prefrontal regions.

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Section: Discussioncontrasting

confidence: 93%

Facial emotion processing and language during early-to-middle childhood development: An event related potential study

Bigelow

Clark

Lum

et al. 2022

Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience

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“…The internal consistency of this task in the current study was found to be α = .58. This is consistent with previous studies that have used the Reading the Eyes through the Mind Test (RMET), which generally report internal consistencies ranging from .37 to .65 (e.g., Bosacki, Moreira, Sitnik, Andrews, & Talwar, 2020 ; Gallant, Lavis, & Mahy, 2020 ; Laghi et al, 2019 ; Meinhardt-Injac, Daum, & Meinhardt, 2020 ; Oakley, Brewer, Bird, & Catmur, 2016 ; Plousia, 2018 ; Vellante et al, 2013 ; Voracek & Dressler, 2006 ).…”

Section: Methodssupporting

confidence: 91%

Empathetic Concern in Emerging Adolescents: The Role of Theory of Mind and Gender Roles

Andrews

Lariccia

Talwar

et al. 2021

The Journal of Early Adolescence

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The current study examined the roles of gender, and gender-role orientation in young adolescents’ empathetic concern. In addition, this study aimed to explore the contribution of Theory of Mind in participants’ empathetic concern. Finally, this study examined whether gender and gender-role orientation were implicated in emerging adolescents’ Theory of Mind understanding. One-hundred-fifty 11- to 12-year-olds (79 self-identified females) completed questionnaires measuring their empathetic concern, Theory of Mind, and their perceived gender-role orientation. Results showed that gender-role orientation, specifically, femininity and masculinity predicted empathetic concern above and beyond gender. In addition, the effects of cognitive and affective Theory of Mind are explored and discussed in relation to empathetic concern. Finally, neither gender nor gender-role orientation was found to contribute to participants’ Theory of Mind understanding. These findings suggest that emerging adolescents’ perceived gender roles, as well as their ability to consider another’s beliefs, play a role in their expression of empathetic concern.

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“…In addition, Gallant et al (2020) found that different affective ToM tasks did not correlate with each other in a sample of preschool children, supporting the hypothesis that diverse instruments measure distinct facets of affective ToM, consequently they suggested that further studies on affective ToM and its measurement are needed.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 70%

“…RMET-C does not require reasoning about mental states but only recognizing them, thus it may be primarily considered a measure of affective mentalizing, mainly focused on emotion recognition (Oakley et al, 2016). Most studies (Rutherford et al, 2012;Ha et al, 2013;Fossati et al, 2014;Gallant et al, 2020) described RMET-C as a measure of affective ToM assessing the ability to understand the feeling of mental states. In addition, some studies (Lawrence et al, 2004;Carroll and Yung, 2006) found that it correlated with measures of empathy.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Further Look at Reading the Mind in the Eyes-Child Version: Association With Fluid Intelligence, Receptive Language, and Intergenerational Transmission in Typically Developing School-Aged Children

Rosso

Riolfo

2020

Front. Psychol.

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A number of tasks have been developed to measure the affective theory of mind (ToM), nevertheless, recent studies found that different affective ToM tasks do not correlate with each other, suggesting that further studies on affective ToM and its measurement are needed. More in-depth knowledge of the tools that are available to assess affective ToM is needed to decide which should be used in research and in clinical practice, and how to interpret results. The current study focuses on the Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test (RMET) primarily to investigate in a sample of 112 children the currently unexplored relationships in middle childhood between performance on the RMET and fluid intelligence. Relationships with receptive vocabulary, age, and sex were also investigated. Moreover, because studying the family's influence on children mentalization could have important implications in developing prevention and treatment interventions, this study offers a novel contribution to the field by exploring the family's influence on children's RMET performance. Although significant positive correlations were found among RMET-C performance, fluid intelligence, and receptive language, regression analysis revealed that fluid intelligence was the only predictor. No family influence was found on children's RMET performance. On the whole, results from the current study offer some support to the hypothesis that RMET-C is not a “pure” ToM task, specifically the effect of fluid intelligence on RMET performance should be taken into account when RMET is used both in research and in the clinical setting.

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Developing an understanding of others’ emotional states: Relations among affective theory of mind and empathy measures in early childhood

Cited by 24 publications

References 43 publications

Facial emotion processing and language during early-to-middle childhood development: An event related potential study

Facial emotion processing and language during early-to-middle childhood development: An event related potential study

Empathetic Concern in Emerging Adolescents: The Role of Theory of Mind and Gender Roles

A Further Look at Reading the Mind in the Eyes-Child Version: Association With Fluid Intelligence, Receptive Language, and Intergenerational Transmission in Typically Developing School-Aged Children

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