Mindreading skills and reactive and self-regulative temperamental behavior patterns in 5- to 8-year-olds

• In Event: Theory of Mind and Mental Health in Childhood and Adolescence: Towards a transdiagnostic approach.

Abstract

Theory of mind (ToM) refers to the mindreading skills that help individuals to understand how others think and feel. Deficits in ToM have been linked to numerous psychiatric and neurological clinical conditions in adults, including schizophrenia, major depression, borderline personality disorder, multiple sclerosis, or Parkinson’s disease (Cotter et al., 2018). Despite the growing literature on ToM deficits and mental health issues in adults, research on individual differences in ToM and their relation to markers of mental health in young children is still sparse. The present study therefore investigates the association between children’s ToM (broadly assessed with a battery measuring basic and more advanced ToM skills) and their reactive and self-regulative temperamental behavior patterns (Rothbart et al., 2001), which we used as markers of individual differences in wellbeing and mental health.

The participants were N = 229 children from kindergarten to Grade 2, who participated in assessments of their (advanced) ToM, language abilities (comprehension of spoken language), and executive functions (inhibition). First-order ToM was assessed with the 6-step ToM scale (Wellman & Liu, 2004); advanced ToM was measured using a battery (Osterhaus et al., 2016) with several items assessing higher-order false belief understanding (Liddle & Nettle, 2006), and the abilities to recognize a faux pas (Baron-Cohen et al., 1999), to read emotions and mental states from the eyes (Baron-Cohen et al., 2001), or to identify nonliteral speech (Happé, 1994). Children’s comprehension of spoken language was assessed using the ‘language receptive’ subtest of the IDS (Intelligence and Developmental Scales; Grob et al., 2009), which required children to act out the content of twelve sentences of increasing grammatical complexity. Reactive and self-regulative temperamental behavior patterns (including the subdimensions surgency/extraversion, negative affect, and effortful control) were assessed through caretaker report, using the 36 items of the Child Behavior Questionnaire (Rothbart et al., 2001). The response rate was 88% (n = 201).

The results revealed that there was a modest association between children’s negative affect and their understanding of nonliteral speech, which was independent of children’s chronological age, inhibition, and language abilities (r = .15, p = .07). That is, children who identified nonliteral speech with greater ease than their peers, tended to have higher levels of negative affect. No other aspect of (advanced) ToM was associated with well-being. These results were confirmed by a network analysis, which revealed significant links between the reactive and self-regulative temperamental behavior patterns, but few to no significant links with (advanced) ToM.

Our findings support the view that an excessive ToM may—already in childhood—be linked to negative affect, which may result in clinical manifestations such as anxiety or depression. The effect was however small—and it emerged only for a single aspect of advanced ToM. This finding supports the importance of assessing ToM in a comprehensive way when investigating its consequences, and it suggests that network analysis is a powerful tool to investigate the associations between ToM and diverse aspects of well-being.

Authors

• Christopher Osterhaus, University of Vechta
  Presenting Author

• Daan Blankenstijn

• Alexander Savi, University of Amsterdam

• Maartje Raijmakers, University of Amsterdam

• Susanne Koerber, Freiburg University of Education