28th International Congress of Psychology August 8 ... - U-netSURF

preschoolers, Yinghe Chen, Yanli Cui, Yuqing Wang, Beijing Normal University, China
Young children’s understanding of mind and emotion constitute the two key early cmoponets of
their social cognition. Individual difference in young children’s theory of Mind, emotion
understanding, aggression, and peer acceptance were examined in 107 urban preschoolers from a
kindergarten in Beijing of China. Results indicated: (1) children’s understanding of false belif and
emotion increased with age. Individual difference in young children’s understanding false-belief;
(2) understanding emotion and relational aggression were associate with difference in language
ability. (3) Results show that both relational aggression and overt aggression are related to peer
acceptance, while false-belief understanding and emotion understanding are not.
2098.29 The social perspective taking in children: Its subtypes and measurement, Qinggong Li,
Qinmei Xu, Zhejiang University, China
The four stories, which were usually used to measure children’s social perspective taking (SPT) in
western culture, were revised in order to measure children’s SPT in Chinese culture, two of them
measured cognitive social perspective taking (CSPT), the other two measured affective social
perspective taking (ASPT). We used the revised stories to measure 5- to 6-year-old children in
China. The results indicated that the measurement of SPT had a good construct validity, and the
developmental level of CSPT was lower than ASPT significantly which might be caused by
different levels of difficulties in understanding the stories.
2098.30 Children’s causal explanations and theory of mind, Cynthia Hsin-feng Wu, National
Chengchi University, Taiwan, China
This research assessed children’s causal utterances and reasoning in relation to children’s theory of
mind, i.e., their explanations of how their own and other people’s minds operate. Forty-eight
2½ to 5½ years old Mandarin-speaking Taiwanese children were engaged in
book-reading activities and given theory of mind tasks regarding others’ false beliefs. Results
indicated that the more varied the children’s causal explanations, the more they tended to pass the
tasks. The finding suggests that children offer explanations to people and themselves in a pursuit
of internal coherence and consistency. In turn, children’s mental development is driven by the
pursuit.
2098.31 Preschoolers’ understanding of second-order mental states, Hajimu Hayashi, Kyoto
University, Japan
This study examines whether preschoolers can understand second-order mental states. Participants
were 4-, 5-, and 6-year-olds. First-order and second-order false belief tasks were prepared. The
two tasks had almost the same simple structure, so there was little difference in
information-processing load between the tasks. The results show that 4-year-olds did not pass
either task, while the 5- and 6-year-olds passed only the first-order task, despite the second-order
belief task being nearly as simple as the first-order belief task. These results indicate that
understanding of second-order mental states is a developmental issue for elementary school
children.
2098.32 The postnatal factor amplifies the difference of TOM ability development between
normal and gifted children, Xiaojuan Jing, Jiannong Shi, Yuqing Zhang, Institute of
494