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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.

Over the past 25 years, there has been tremendous interest in the development of children’s ability to reason about others’ mental states, or “theory of mind”. Much research has explored children's understanding of situational cues that lead to knowledge, but only recently has research begun to assess children's understanding of person-specific differences in knowledge. A number of studies (Birch, Vauthier & Bloom, 2008; Jaswal & Neely, 2006; Koenig, Clément & Harris, 2004) have recently demonstrated that at least by age 3 children pay attention to others' history of accuracy and use it as a cue when deciding from whom to learn. However, the nature and scope of children's interpretations of other's prior accuracy remains unclear. Experiment 1 assessed whether 4- and 5-year-olds interpret prior accuracy as indicative of knowledge, as opposed to two other accounts that do not involve epistemic attributions. This experiment revealed that preschool children can revise their tendency to prefer to learn from a previously accurate informant over an inaccurate one when presented with evidence regarding each informant's current knowledge state. Experiment 2 investigated how broadly a person's history of accuracy influences children's subsequent inferences, and showed that 5-year-olds (but not 4-year-olds) use information about an individual's past accuracy to predict her knowledge in other related domains as well as her propensity for prosocial or antisocial behaviour. Overall, children's performance in these experiments suggests that both 4- and 5-year-olds interpret others' history of accuracy as indicative of knowledge; however, 4-year-olds make a more restricted attribution of knowledge while 5-year-olds make a more stable, trait-like attribution. These findings are discussed in terms of their implications for research on theory of mind and more broadly on children's social and cognitive development.

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

During the preschool years, children across all cultures that have been tested seem to come to an explicit understanding of the fact that mental states are related to but ultimately separate from the reality that they are meant to represent. This understanding is sometimes called a representational theory of mind (RTM). I hypothesized that the neurotransmitter dopamine (DA) would be associated with RTM development in preschoolers. I selected DA because several lines of work now suggest that the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) is critical for RTM and its development. In both animals and humans DA has been shown to play a crucial role in the development of frontal regions. In the first study, I recorded the spontaneous eyeblink rates (EBR) of 60 preschool aged children (range: 48-62 months) who were also given tasks that assessed their RTM and response-conflict executive functioning (RC-EF) skill. In both animal and human models EBR increases with available DA, and thus EBR can be used as an indirect measure of DA functioning. Regression analyses showed that EBR predicted unique variance in RTM and one Stroop-like measure of RC-EF performance after controlling for the effects of age and language ability. In the second study, I also administered a battery of RTM and RC-EF tasks to 79 preschool aged children (range: 42- 54 months). I recorded their spontaneous EBR in addition to collecting genetic material which was processed for allelic variations of DA turnover, transport, and receptor genes. Polymorphisms of catechol-O-methyl transferase gene (COMT) and the dopamine receptor D4 gene (DRD4) were associated with children’s RTM performance. These findings provide preliminary evidence that DA functioning is associated with RTM development in the preschool years. Results suggest that there may be a selective effect of DA on RTM ability. / Thesis (Master, Psychology) -- Queen's University, 2009-09-08 12:45:24.627

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

Objective: Primarily, to determine if affective Theory of Mind (ToM) decoding differs between patients with bipolar disorder who are experiencing mania, euthymia, or depression. Secondarily, to determine if a bias in ToM in patients experiencing different affective episodes is related to a positive, negative, or neutral valence of the target. Finally, to determine if mental state decoding is related to the severity of depressive, manic, or anxious symptoms Methods: A prospective, cross-sectional, study of ToM in patients with bipolar disorder experiencing mania (n = 14), depression (n = 25), or euthymia (n = 20), using the “Reading the Mind in the Eyes Task” (Eyes Task) and the Animal Task developed to control for nonsocial response demands of the Eyes Task. Measures of depressive and anxious symptoms were taken using self-report scales. Interview measures of depressive and manic symptoms were also conducted. A review of patient records was conducted to collect information regarding medications, and course of illness variables. Results: Patients experiencing mania were significantly impaired in mental state decoding compared to euthymic and depressed patients with bipolar disorder. No significant difference was observed between the depressed and euthymic groups. These relationships were maintained when controlling for age of illness onset and Animal Task accuracy. No effect of valence was found. Manic symptom severity was negatively correlated to Animal Task accuracy but no other relationships between Eyes and Animal Tasks and the severity of manic, depressive, or anxious symptoms were found. Group differences in Eyes Task performance were not due to differences in demographics, axis I comorbidities, history of psychosis, or course of illness measures. Limitations: The sample was too small to assess differences between acutely and chronically ill patients. There was no assessment of neurocognition or intelligence using tasks previously validated with manic patients. Conclusions: Patients with bipolar disorder experiencing mania were significantly impaired in mental state decoding compared to patients who were depressed or euthymic. The deficit in ToM decoding in manic patients independent of indicators of illness severity may be indicative of qualitative differences in interpersonal dysfunction between mania, depression, and euthymia in patients with bipolar disorder. / Thesis (Master, Neuroscience Studies) -- Queen's University, 2011-02-10 13:18:17.667

Over the past 25 years, there has been tremendous interest in the development of children’s ability to reason about others’ mental states, or “theory of mind”. Much research has explored children's understanding of situational cues that lead to knowledge, but only recently has research begun to assess children's understanding of person-specific differences in knowledge. A number of studies (Birch, Vauthier & Bloom, 2008; Jaswal & Neely, 2006; Koenig, Clément & Harris, 2004) have recently demonstrated that at least by age 3 children pay attention to others' history of accuracy and use it as a cue when deciding from whom to learn. However, the nature and scope of children's interpretations of other's prior accuracy remains unclear. Experiment 1 assessed whether 4- and 5-year-olds interpret prior accuracy as indicative of knowledge, as opposed to two other accounts that do not involve epistemic attributions. This experiment revealed that preschool children can revise their tendency to prefer to learn from a previously accurate informant over an inaccurate one when presented with evidence regarding each informant's current knowledge state. Experiment 2 investigated how broadly a person's history of accuracy influences children's subsequent inferences, and showed that 5-year-olds (but not 4-year-olds) use information about an individual's past accuracy to predict her knowledge in other related domains as well as her propensity for prosocial or antisocial behaviour. Overall, children's performance in these experiments suggests that both 4- and 5-year-olds interpret others' history of accuracy as indicative of knowledge; however, 4-year-olds make a more restricted attribution of knowledge while 5-year-olds make a more stable, trait-like attribution. These findings are discussed in terms of their implications for research on theory of mind and more broadly on children's social and cognitive development.