The present mixed-methods study examined adolescents’ social perspective taking in contexts of social justice as demonstrated by their awareness and interpretations of hypothetical peer interactions depicting racism and sexism. Fifty adolescents in Grades 9 and 12 participated in a semi-structured interview in which they were presented with two scenarios, involving adolescents in conflicts portraying racism and sexism. They were asked a series of questions designed to elicit their awareness and understanding of social group differences. Qualitative analyses revealed three categories of adolescents’ responses, reflecting distinct interpretations of social group differences. On average, adolescents assumed a perspective that was naïve to the disparities existing between vulnerable and less vulnerable social groups. Furthermore, it was shown that older adolescents had significantly more sophisticated social justice understandings than younger adolescents. These findings highlight the need to educate adolescents about issues of social justice and facilitate an appreciation of social group differences.

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Theory of mind, the ability to attribute mental states to oneself and others, has traditionally been investigated in humans and nonhuman primates. However, non-primate species, such as domestic dogs, may also be potential candidates for such a faculty. Domestic dogs (Canis familiaris) evolved from a social-living, wolf-like ancestor, and were the first species to be domesticated, with likely selection for sensitivity to human cues and human-like cognitive abilities. Dogs typically spend their lives in the rich social environment of human families, and thus dogs are naturally enculturated. The combination of these factors make dogs an excellent candidate for having a functional theory of mind. Yet perhaps surprisingly, prior research on theory of mind in dogs is limited, with inconclusive and contradictory results. The research described in this thesis is a systematic investigation of dogs' potential to demonstrate a functional theory of mind in their interactions with humans. Four experiments are presented, based on the Knower-Guesser paradigm (Povinelli et al., 1990), in which a knowledgeable and an ignorant human informant indicated the location of hidden food to the dog. In Experiment 1, one informant was absent (Guesser) and one present (Knower) during the food-hiding, and the dogs chose the Knower. However, when both informants were present, the dogs chose the informant that did the baiting, but this preference was less than when the Guesser was absent. In Experiments 2 and 3, a third experimenter hid the food while the informants covered their cheeks (Knower) or eyes (Guesser) with their hands, or were attentive (Knower) or inattentive (Guesser) to the food-hiding. In both cases, the dogs showed a significant preference for the Knower. In Experiment 4, the dogs showed no preference between the informants when they had equal perceptual access to the baiting, and were unsuccessful at selecting any container when the informants did not provide communicative cues. Overall, the present research provides the most definitive evidence yet that domestic dogs may be able to attribute differential states of knowledge to human observers, and thus may possess a functional theory of mind.

This dissertation explored the subjective experience and neural correlates of self-conscious emotion (SCE) understanding in adolescent males with high-functioning Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) and age-matched neurotypical (NT) males (ages 11-17). Study I investigated group differences in SCE attributions (the ability to recognize SCEs conveyed by others) and empathic SCEs (the ability/tendency to feel empathic SCEs for others) in 56 adolescents (ASD = 30; NT = 26). It also explored associations between SCE processing and a triad of social cognitive abilities (self-awareness/introspection, perspective-taking/cognitive empathy, affective empathy) and autistic symptoms/traits. Study II investigated the neural correlates of SCE processing in 52 adolescents (ASD = 27; NT = 25). During an MRI scan, participants completed the Self-Conscious Emotions Task-Child, which included 24 salient, ecologically-valid videos of adolescents participating in a singing competition. Videos represented two factors: emotion (embarrassment, pride) and perspective-taking (PT) demands (low, high). In low PT clips, singers’ emotions matched their performance (sing poorly, act embarrassed); in high PT clips, they did not (sing well, act embarrassed). Participants used a 4-point Likert scale to rate how intensely embarrassed and proud singers felt. They made congruent ratings, which matched the conveyed emotions (rating how embarrassed an embarrassed singer felt), and incongruent ratings, which did not match the conveyed emotions (rating how proud an embarrassed singer felt). Outside the scanner, participants rated how empathically embarrassed and proud they felt for the singers. The ASD and NT groups made similarly intense inferred congruent and empathic congruent SCE ratings, suggesting that emotion attribution and affective empathy are intact in ASD. However, the ASD group made more intense inferred incongruent SCE ratings, suggesting that emotion attribution in ASD may be more strongly impacted by the situational context. An over-reliance on contextual cues may reflect a strict adherence to rule-following and serve as a compensatory strategy for attenuated mentalizing. Neuroimaging results support this interpretation. The ASD group recruited atypical neural patterns within social cognition regions, visual perception regions, salience regions, and sensorimotor regions. These findings similarly suggest an over-reliance on abstract social conceptual knowledge when processing discrepant affective and contextual cues. Implications for intervention are discussed. / 10000-01-01

In learning language, children have to acquire not only words and constructions, but also the ability to make inferences about a speaker’s intended meaning. For instance, if in answer to the question, ‘what did you put in the bag?’, the speaker says, ‘I put in a book’, then the hearer infers that the speaker put in only a book, by assuming that the speaker is informative. On a Gricean approach to pragmatics, this implicated meaning – a quantity implicature – involves reasoning about the speaker’s epistemic state. This thesis examines children’s development of implicature understanding. It seeks to address the question of what the relationship is in development between quantity, relevance and manner implicatures; whether word learning by exclusion is a pragmatic forerunner to implicature, or based on a lexical heuristic; and whether reasoning about the speaker’s epistemic state is part of children’s pragmatic competence. This thesis contributes to research in experimental and developmental pragmatics by broadening the focus of investigation to include different types of implicatures, the relationship between them, and the contribution of other aspects of children’s development, including structural language knowledge. It makes the novel comparison of word learning by exclusion with a clearly pragmatic skill – implicatures – and opens an investigation of manner implicatures in development. It also presents new findings suggesting that children’s early competence with quantity implicatures in simple communicative situations belies their ongoing development in more complex ones, particularly where the speaker’s epistemic state is at stake. I present a series of experiments based on a sentence-to-picture-matching task, with children aged 3 to 7 years. In the first study, I identify a developmental trajectory whereby word learning by exclusion inferences emerge first, followed by ad hoc quantity and relevance, and finally scalar quantity inferences, which reflects their increasing complexity in a Gricean model. Then, I explore cognitive and environmental factors that might be associated with children’s pragmatic skills, and show that structural language knowledge – and, associated with it, socioeconomic status – is a main predictor of their implicature understanding. In the second study, I lay out some predictions for the development of manner implicatures, find similar patterns of understanding in children and adults, and highlight the particular challenges of studying manner implicatures experimentally. Finally, I focus on children’s ability to take into account the speaker’s epistemic state in pragmatic inferencing. While adults do not derive a quantity implicature appropriately when the speaker is ignorant, children tend to persist in deriving implicatures regardless of speaker ignorance, suggesting a continuing challenge of integrating contextual with linguistic information in utterance interpretation.

Children with developmental delays often do not acquire perspective taking skills without training. These skills are imperative to the ability to relate to others socially and the development of appropriate social behavior. They may lack the ability to recognize that another person’s view may differ from their own, or that reality may differ from appearance. This study used deictic relational training to aid in the development of a ‘Theory of Mind’ and the acquisition of perspective taking skills. The PEAK relational training system was used in a special education classroom to train YOU and I relations, as well as YOU and I reversal, to two nine year old students with intellectual disability. Multiple exemplar training was then used to promote the generalization of these perspective taking skills to an in situ deceptive container task. One subject participated in the first two training phases, but was absent for the remainder of the study. The second subject successfully completed all training phases and was then able to correctly respond when asked to report what the perspective of another individual would be.

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Much research has shown that women are more empathic than men. Yet, women and men are equally forgiving. However, it is not clear whether empathy is more important to forgiveness for men or for women. The purpose of the present study was to examine gender differences in levels of empathy and forgiveness and the extent to which the association of empathy and forgiveness differed by gender. Participants were 127 community residents who completed self-report measures of empathy and forgiveness. The present results showed that women were more empathic than men, but no gender difference for forgiveness was apparent. However, the association between empathy and forgiveness did differ by gender. Empathy was associated with forgiveness in men—but not in women.

The focus of the current study was to determine if SIP biases and perspective-taking serve as mediators between parental intimate partner violence (IPV), aggression, and interpersonal dominance in emerging adults' romantic relationships. We analyzed archival data comprised of self-report measures and TAT stories administered to 84 undergraduate students (women n = 62, M age = 21.73) between the ages 18 and 35. To test our hypotheses, we modified the social information processing model by incorporating perspective-taking, as measured through Interpersonal Decentering. Overall, we did not find significant association between witnessing parental IPV and Interpersonal Decentering maturity in college students. However, women's father-to-mother IPV was significantly negatively associated with Interpersonal Decentering maturity. For our mediation model, SIP aggressive responding biases were significantly associated with Interpersonal Decentering (average of story average scores) and with the presence of aggression in current romantic relationships; however, Interpersonal Decentering was not significantly predictive of aggression in current romantic relationships. Gender differences, study strengths and limitations, and future research directions are discussed.