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Thesis advisor: Joan Lucariello / Metarepresentational Theory of Mind was studied in children with autism and Asperger syndrome. This research challenged the prominent view that Theory of Mind (ToM) is a single, integrated cognitive ability, wherein reasoning about the mental states of self and others are considered to be one and the same. The Functional Multilinear Socialization Model (Lucariello, 2004) proposes that ToM differentiates into separate cognitive abilities based on the target of reasoning. Social ToM is defined as reasoning about others' mental states. Intrapersonal ToM is defined reasoning about one's own mental states. The current work aimed to investigate if ToM abilities in children with autism and Asperger syndrome differentiate into Social and Intrapersonal ToM. A second aim was to determine if ToM differentiation patterns for children with autism and Asperger syndrome were different. Participants included 39 children with autism and 34 children with Asperger syndrome ages 8-14. Measures included a language measure, an IQ measure, and a battery of ToM tasks. The ToM tasks assessed Social and Intrapersonal ToM related to distinguishing appearance from reality, representational change, false belief, and perspective-taking across the domains of emotions, beliefs, and perceptions. Theory of Mind differentiated into Social ToM and Intrapersonal ToM for all participants. Both children with autism and Asperger syndrome obtained lower Social ToM scores than Intrapersonal ToM scores. ToM differentiation patterns for children with autism were distinct from children with Asperger syndrome. The difference between Intrapersonal ToM and Social ToM was greater for children with autism than children with Asperger syndrome. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2009. / Submitted to: Boston College. Lynch School of Education. / Discipline: Counseling, Developmental, and Educational Psychology.

Thesis advisor: Liane Young / People are often quite attuned to the minds around them, but it’s unclear whether the tendency to consider the minds of others differs depending on the context. Research on intergroup processes and interpersonal relations reveal that the tendency to consider the minds of others depend on factors like group membership; however, interactions with ingroup members and outgroup members tend to conflate with cooperative interactions and competitive interactions, respectively. Cooperation and competition are two categories of interactions that encompass most of collective human behavior and thus provide natural categories for grouping social behaviors. We test the idea that people’s tendencies to consider the minds of others depend on the type of social interaction by primarily focusing on cooperation and competition. Papers 1 and 2 directly compare theory of mind across cooperative and competitive contexts, whereas Paper 3 aims to understand the role of theory of mind in supporting one important aspect of cooperation—a sense of fairness—by studying responses to different forms of unfairness across a spectrum of ages in children. Altogether, these results show an influence of theory of mind on social evaluations and social behaviors and support the idea that sensitivity to context may emerge early in life but becomes more difficult to detect over time. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2018. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Psychology.

The perspective taking ability of children with aggressive behaviour problems was explored, by comparing them with non-aggressive children on tasks involving the prediction of emotion and behaviour on hypothetical short story vignettes. Their ability to correctly predict emotion and behaviour in emotionally charged, personally involving tasks was investigated, and linked with their security of attachment and verbal intelligence. Contrary to what was predicted, the aggressive children were not observed to perform poorly on complex emotionally charged, personally involving vignettes. Also, security of attachment was not seen to relate to performance on vignettes. The ability to provide explanations of responses which incorporated a coherent description of the differing and false beliefs held by different characters correlated with verbal intelligence and tentatively with security of attachment. The two groups showed significant differences on all sub-scales of a measure of abnormal social behaviour and two out of three sub-scales of a measure of security of attachment. The results do not present a clear picture, but suggest that verbal intelligence is associated with perspective taking and understanding of emotion. A consideration of methodological issues suggests that the short story vignettes suffer from poor reliability and possibly poor validity. The findings are discussed with relation to other literature, in particular an alternative theory of the development of emotion understanding that emphasizes the role of coherent psychological discourse by the caregiver. The role of disorganised attachment in childhood aggression is also discussed. Implications for clinical practice are considered and suggestions for future research are outlined.

When children role play, they do things such as change their tone of voice or take on the character’s emotions or needs. These behaviours make it appear as though children adopt the mental perspective of the character they are pretending to be, which has led some researchers to argue that children “think-as-if” they are the character while role playing (e.g., Harris, 2000). However, it is questionable whether these sorts of behaviours can really be taken as strong evidence that children are “thinking-as-if”; children might simply be imitating the distinctive behavioural characteristics of the character they are pretending to be – or “behaving-as-if”. In two studies, I attempted to obtain better evidence that children “think-as-if” while role playing. To do this, I developed a novel paradigm called the Pretend Self-recognition (PSR) task that examines how children refer to photographs of themselves while they are pretending to be someone else. I reasoned that if children were truly “thinking-as-if”, they might see the photograph of themselves as a third person would, and thus refer to the photograph of themselves using their own proper name. In contrast, if children were simply "behaving-as-if", they might continue to refer to the photograph with the personal pronoun “me”. In Study 1, approximately half of 4-year-old children labeled their own photograph from the perspective of the character they were pretending to be, and thus showed evidence of "thinking-as-if". This finding was replicated when children were given the PSR task at two time points along with measures of theory of mind, executive functioning, pretense understanding, and narrative absorption. Results showed that PSR performance was stable across testing period, but was not related to any of the other constructs that were also measured. Taken together, the findings reported in this dissertation show that the PSR task is a reliable measure of perspective taking in role play, though the source of individual differences in the measure remains a target for future research. The lack of relation between individual differences might suggest that PSR performance is orthogonal to the other constructs and is something in its own right. / Thesis (Ph.D, Psychology) -- Queen's University, 2009-04-15 17:02:11.029

This study was conducted to explore the ability and propensity to verbally deceive others in children with and without autism spectrum disorders (ASD). We also explored the relationships among lie-telling ability, false belief understanding as measured using a standard battery of false belief tasks, and verbal mental age as measured using a standardized test of language ability. To explore antisocial lie-telling ability, we used a modified temptation resistance paradigm in which children were tempted to commit a transgression in the experimenter’s absence and given the opportunity to tell a lie about their transgression and to exercise semantic leakage control (SLC)—that is, to maintain consistency between the lie and subsequent statements that they make. To explore prosocial lie-telling ability, we used a modified undesirable gift paradigm in which children were awarded an unattractive prize for winning a game and given the opportunity to lie about liking the prize that the experimenter gave them. We found that children with ASD, like typically developing children, can and do tell antisocial lies to conceal a transgression, and prosocial lies in politeness settings. However, children with ASD were less able than typically developing children to exercise SLC. Furthermore, we found that, unlike in typically developing children, lie-telling ability in children with ASD was not related to their false belief understanding. The pattern of relations among lie-telling ability, false belief understanding, and verbal mental age are discussed with respect to possible contentions regarding the underlying processes by which children with ASD tell lies and succeed on false belief tasks. / Thesis (Master, Psychology) -- Queen's University, 2009-09-25 23:03:37.259

A broad review of assessment and intervention research relevant to Theory of Mind (Baron-Cohen, 1985) and Autism Spectrum Disorders from birth to age twelve was conducted. Nine assessment articles were reviewed to examine the major differences between children with autism spectrum disorders and children who are typically developing, particularly in the area of social perception. Assessment tasks aimed to discover a child's thoughts relevant to another's thoughts, beliefs, and emotions. It was discovered that children with autism spectrum disorders performed less well on Theory of Mind tasks, and tended to provide responses that were more egocentric and idiosyncratic in nature. A review of the intervention research revealed improvement in Theory of Mind domains is possible when teaching strategies explicitly target goals relevant to perspective taking. Generalization of skills to natural environments was a lacking area across all twelve articles, indicating a need for more intensive practice in natural environments. Interestingly, when social skills were taught in the absence of Theory of Mind training, no collateral effects were observed to Theory of Mind domain. / text

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One of the most heavily researched topics of cognitive development concerns children's growing understanding of people's behaviors as reflecting mental states such as beliefs, desires and intentions. Anthropomorphism is the overextension of this conceptual framework, referred to as "theory of mind", to nonhuman animals and inanimate objects. In this dissertation, I investigate the development and correlates of anthropomorphism building on and extending past research with children and adults. In Study 1, I investigated the relation between anthropomorphism, social understanding, and social behaviors that are known to correlate with theory of mind, such as empathy, and prosocial attitudes in a college sample (N = 919). Contrary to my predictions, results showed that anthropomorphism is only weakly related to the measures of social understanding. There was, however, some evidence for a link between anthropomorphism and imaginary companions; individuals who had a history of imaginary companions scored higher on anthropomorphism. In Study 2, I examined the link between theory of mind and anthropomorphism in preschool children. In addition, I investigated the developmental trajectory of anthropomorphism from age 4 to 6 and the relation between anthropomorphism and role play and social preferences. Seventy-four children (36 girls; Mage = 5 years, 5 months; SD = 9 months) took part in this study. In order to assess anthropomorphism in this age group, I used two methods: interview and movie narrative measures. Results revealed no age-related changes in anthropomorphism scores of the children. As in Study 1, I did not find a strong relationship between the theory of mind measures and anthropomorphism. There was, however, more evidence for a link between the interview measure of anthropomorphism and role play, and social preferences of children. Overall, in both studies, theory of mind, the most obvious candidate as a correlate of anthropomorphism, was, at best, not a strong predictor of the anthropomorphism, suggesting the need to rethink how developing knowledge about people is related to the overextension of this knowledge to nonhuman entities. It is possible that a rudimentary understanding of humans is necessary to be able to overextend it, but whether you overextend it might be linked to other factors.

Vulnerability to major depressive disorder (MDD) is characterized by extensive interpersonal dysfunction. A framework that has been used to understand this impairment is theory of mind, or the ability to decode and reason about others’ mental states. Previous research has identified a mental state decoding advantage in individuals with a past history of MDD, which has been explained in terms of an enhanced social orientation in those with depression vulnerability. Although social phobia is highly comorbid with MDD, there is no research investigating theory of mind abilities in individuals with social phobia, nor has there been research examining how social anxiety may better account for the relation of depression to heightened theory of mind ability. Furthermore, there is a paucity of research investigating whether evidence of such a relation extends to the more complex task of reasoning about others’ mental states. Thus, the goals of the current investigation were to examine whether heightened ToM accuracy in those with a history of MDD is better accounted for by social phobia, and whether superior ToM skills in those with past MDD are seen across tasks that tap the domains of decoding and reasoning. Participants (N = 109) were assigned to one of four groups based on a structured diagnostic interview: (a) past MDD only (n = 36); (b) social anxiety disorder only (n = 9); (c) comorbid past MDD and social anxiety disorder (n = 23); and (d) no psychiatric history (n = 41). Results show that having a history of MDD is associated with heightened mental state reasoning abilities only in the presence of current social phobia. However, theory of mind decoding was not elevated in this condition. This suggests that social phobia differentially influences the relation of past MDD and theory of mind ability for decoding and reasoning abilities. Furthermore, social phobia without a history of depression was associated with poor theory of mind decoding and reasoning. This reduced ability in individuals with social phobia may be the result of self-focused attention or avoidance of potential negative evaluation, but future research is required to specifically address these possibilities. / Thesis (Master, Psychology) -- Queen's University, 2012-08-28 10:30:44.686