Poster #192 - Hostile, Ambiguous and Benign Intentions by Vignette Outcome in Typically Developing 4- to 12-year-olds

• In Event: 3-106 - Poster Session 11
  In Poster Session: PS 11 Section - Social Cognition

Integrative Statement

Dodge (1980) found that aggressive children attribute hostile intentions to others when presented with vignettes in which the intention of a protagonist is unclear, but the protagonist’s action leads to a negative outcome for another character. Typically developing children tend to ascribe positive intentions in such contexts. Indeed, much research now exists on aggressive children’s hostile attribution bias (HAB).
Theory of mind (ToM) refers to young children’s growing recognition that people have mental states (e.g., beliefs, desires, or intentions) and that they act on these mental states, even when reality contradicts them. ToM undergoes significant changes over the preschool and school years. Although much research exists on children’s understanding of beliefs and desires, less is known about their understanding of intentions. Given that vignettes used to assess the HAB require understanding intentions, they can be construed as ToM tasks.
The current study examined developmental differences in typically developing 4-12-year-olds’ ability to attribute different intentions with matching or mismatching vignette outcomes. Intention attribution was examined using Time 1 data of a community-based sample of 4-12-year-olds (N = 1984) attending 15 schools in 5 communities participating in the Socially and Emotionally Aware Kids (SEAK) project. The SEAK project is a 4-year Canadian longitudinal cohort-sequential school-based intervention study designed to evaluate PATHS (Promoting Alternative Thinking Strategies; Kusché & Greenberg, 1994) on children’s developing cognition, language, emotion, social skills, academic performance, and mental and physical health. The HAB task used in SEAK included 12 vignettes, all involving different storylines presented via touchscreen laptops (see Figure 1 for vignette examples). Four vignettes each depicted a protagonist’s hostile, ambiguous or benign intent toward another character. Half of each vignette type had a negative outcome for the other character, half had a positive outcome. For each vignette, participants decided whether the protagonist did an action to be nice (or accidentally) or to be mean and were scored as ascribing positive (+1) or negative (-1) intentions, respectively.
Using age (4- through 12-year-olds) and sex as between-groups variables, intention (hostile, ambiguous, benign) and vignette outcome (positive vs. negative) as repeated measures, analyses revealed significant main effects of age, vignette outcome, and intention. Two-way interactions involving each of these variables were also significant, although these were subsumed under a significant three-way interaction, F(16, 3932)=8.54, MSE=0.30, p=.03, Partial η2=.007, observed power=.95 (Figure 2). Children at all ages ascribed more positive intentions to protagonists if vignette outcomes were positive for the other character, irrespective of the protagonist’s actual intention. From 6 years onwards, vignettes depicting hostile intentions were significantly rated as more hostile than vignettes with ambiguous and benign intentions, which also differed from each other. Consistent with previous findings, participants had a positive intent attribution for vignettes depicting ambiguous intentions. However, younger children were even reluctant to ascribe hostile intentions to protagonists who held such intents when vignettes ended well. In other words, as anticipated from the ToM literature, younger children distinguished less between mental states (intentions) themselves than older age groups, especially when intentions did not match observable outcomes.

Author

• Sophie Jacques, Dalhousie University
  Presenting Author