Relations Between Maternal Mental State Language and Child Perspective-Taking Moderated by Child Age

• In Event: Poster Session 12
  In Poster Session: PS 12 Topic - Social Cognition

Abstract

Mental State Language (MSL) is defined as terms used to characterize thoughts, feelings, emotions, desires and physiological states (Bretherton & Beegley, 1982). When parents incorporate MSL into conversations with children, this supports children’s socioemotional and cognitive development (Fivush, Reese & Haden, 2006). Past research has explored how maternal MSL differs by child sex – for example, mothers use more emotion MSL with daughters than sons (Kuebli, Butler & Fivush, 1995) – but has not yet delved into how the benefits of maternal MSL may differ based on child age as children are developing theory of mind. The present study aims to address how maternal MSL relates to children’s perspective-taking, and how this relation varies across the late preschool to early school age.
Participants included 185 children, ages 5 to 7 years old (M=77.46 months, SD=9.25 months). Approximately half of the children were male (53%) and most participants were European American (58%), African American (14%), or of multiple ethnicities (19%). The average family income-to-needs ratio was 2.84 (SD = 1.59) with 4.84 (SD = 1.14) people in the household. Mother-child dyads participated in an 8-minute conflict discussion task at the university laboratory. Dyads discussed two topics on which they frequently disagreed at home. The first minute of each topic was transcribed, resulting in a 2-minute sample of dialog. Transcripts were coded for the presence and type of MSL used by mothers (Hall & Nagy, 1987), and mothers’ mean length of utterance (MLU), defined as “the ratio of total number of morphemes over the total number of utterances” (Brown, 1973). An MSL proportion score was calculated to measure the density of MSL by dividing the MSL total score by MLU. Additionally, children engaged in a first-order false belief emotional perspective-taking (EPT) task and a second-order false believe cognitive perspective-taking (CPT) task. Both tasks consisted of two stories requiring children to follow characters’ actions and understand that one character had limited knowledge of the situation. Children responded to training and trial questions; scores ranged from 0 to 4 with higher scores indicating greater perspective-taking abilities.
When mothers used MSL, it most often focused on desire/intention, cognition, or emotion. Mothers made an average of 5.82 MSL references in the 2-minute excerpts (SD=3.36). Hierarchical linear regression models were run in SPSS to test interactions between the MSL proportion score and child age after controlling for maternal education, child sex and race/ethnicity, and number of languages spoken at home predicting child CPT and EPT. There was a marginally significant interaction between MSL and child age predicting CPT, β=-.147, p=.052. Although simple slopes were not significantly different from zero, findings suggest more maternal MSL relates to greater child CPT among younger children (see Figure 1). Younger children in our sample were late preschool-age, a developmental period where theory of mind understanding is starting to emerge. Thus, this early social-cognitive understanding may be especially enhanced by parents’ MSL that encourage them to start reflecting on internal states.

Authors

• Monica Rentowski, University of Texas at Dallas
  Presenting Author

• Jackie A Nelson, University of Texas at Dallas
  Non-Presenting Author

• Shraddha Trehan, University of Texas at Dallas
  Non-Presenting Author