Theory of mind and self-concept in preadolescents: Links with gender and language.

Abstract

The investigation of the ability to attribute mental states to others and to see them as the basis for people's actions has been referred to as "theory of mind" (ToM) research. This study assessed ToM, or social understanding, in preadolescents and examined individual differences in the relations among social understanding, self-concept, and language competence. One hundred twenty-eight preadolescents (64 girls, 64 boys; mean age =11 years, 9 months) completed tasks concerning self-concept and vocabulary and participated in a story-telling interview that assessed social and self-understanding. There were positive associations between children's social understanding and (a) self-understanding, (b) selfperceptions of behavioral conduct, and (c) general vocabulary ability. Independent of vocabulary ability, girls scored higher than boys on both social and self-understanding tasks.

The adolescent mind in school: theory of mind and self-concept in Canadian and Polish youth

“…Consequently, in one of the two stories, participants could get 0 -2 points for including mental states in predicting behaviours (answers 1 and 3) and 0 -6 points for the quality of each explanations (answers 2 and 4). The aggregate results lead to a range of 0-8 points in one story, 0 -16 points in the whole two-story task for the Polish sample and 0-42 in Canadian sample (see Bosacki, 2000;Bosacki & Astington, 1999). Regardless of the range of results, in each study, higher scores reflect higher ToM understanding.…”

“…The Polish and Canadian samples followed similar story tasks and the conceptual rules for coding (Bosacki, 2000). More specifically, for both samples, responses to each question were coded according to their accurateness (mental state and emotional labelling) and their level of conceptual sophistication (understanding of the socially ambiguous situation or what causes emotions for both self and peer).…”

“…Due to the translation and adaptation of the English-version measure to Polish, some of the coding procedures were adapted to apply to the Canadian and Polish tasks accordingly. For example, for the Canadian sample, the task was adapted from a larger version that contained more detailed questions regarding social and moral understanding (see Bosacki, 2000, for further details). For the purpose of this study, the questions that were reported in this study were the most similar to the questions used in the Polish sample to attempt to replicate the measure.…”

“…Gleaned from past research, to assess ToM adapted versions of two brief vignettes consisting of an ambiguous social situation were used (social ambiguous stories; Bosacki, 2000Bosacki, , 2008Bosacki & Astington, 1999). Borrowing from theoretical work that views ToM as a vehicle or instrument that is used to co-construct or narrate one's social reality (Astington, 1993;Astington & Pelletier, 1996), and studies that investigate an advanced ToM through the use of narratives (Hughes, 2011), this task aimed to assess the ToM involved in interpreting social meaning from ambiguous stories.…”

Can Older People See Something Apart from Themselves?

“…Nonetheless, only a few studies have been conducted to find the correlation between gender and ToM. The results have been contradictory, and most found little advantage for females [18].…”