Social cognition and moral cognition in bullying: What's ... - DPSS

Social Cognition Task: The Stories
A set of 15 short stories was designed to test children’s understanding of mental
states and emotions. Some of these stories were translated from Happé (1994) and
Sutton et al. (1999b), and additional stories were created reflecting the same structure of
the pre-existent stories. Even though some stories (e.g., the “army/war” story) are less
relevant for children than others, they all seemed to be understandable and valid for
primary school pupils.
The 15 stories were divided into three categories, five stories for each category:
a) Cognitive stories: these stories require the understanding of mental states,
thoughts, beliefs, intentions of characters, which determine their behavior.
Example of cognitive story (Happé, 1994):
«During the war, the Red army captures a member of the Blue army. They
want him to tell them where his army's tanks are; they know they are either by
the sea or in the mountains. They know that the prisoner will not want to tell
them, he will want to save his army, and so he will certainly lie to them. The
prisoner is very brave and very clever, he will not let them find his tanks. The
tanks are really in the mountains. Now when the other side ask him where his
tanks are, he says, "They are in the mountains"»;
b) Emotion stories: in these stories the understanding of what kind of emotion is
appropriate within a specific situation is crucial. Moreover, the child needs to
understand that emotions can be clearly shown or, on the contrary, dissimulated,
to influence and modify others’ knowledge. In order to facilitate participants’
answers, children were presented with drawings of faces representing different
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