Relationships Between Children’s Social Interactions and Theory of Mind Development: An Investigation of Pretend Play and Conflict Using Parent Reports

“Theory of mind” (ToM) has become an important theoretical construct in developmental psychology. It refers to the everyday ability to make sense of human behaviour, through an understanding of people as mentalising beings. This understanding is often assessed through a classic false belief test, though there is vast individual difference in the age at which this test is passed: most children pass the task at around the age of 4 years, with a range in the age of competence anywhere from 3 to 5 years in typically developing children. Given this considerable variation, much research in this field has examined factors which predict these individual differences, with one such line of enquiry focussing on social interaction experiences which might predict false belief task success. Research along this vein has examined factors such as family conversations and maternal language, though the aim of the current thesis was to examine the role of uniquely childish social interactions that might foster ToM. This focus was inspired by the finding that children who have siblings develop ToM precociously compared to singleton (only) children, suggesting that child-to-child interactions may indeed be particularly important for ToM development. Two uniquely childish interactions were chosen for examination: pretend play and conflict. While examining each of these social interactions, a somewhat novel methodological approach of a parent questionnaire was adopted, rather than direct, observational methods. Thus a secondary aim of the current thesis was to determine if the rich resource of parents could be usefully tapped to obtain information about child interactions. The first 2 empirical chapters of this thesis focussed on pretend play. The first chapter examined the question of whether pretence and ToM are linked in a cognitive sense, that is, whether understanding in pretence precedes understanding in belief, and whether these 2 areas of understanding are related to each other. This was achieved through 4 experiments, which replicated then modified the procedures of Custer (1996) and Hickling, Wellman and Gottfried (1997), using a sample of 210 children. The results of the experiments within this chapter suggested that pretence understanding did not precede belief understanding. However, pretence understanding was associated with ToM, begging the question as to why this might be so. The proposition offered was that the social and communication qualities of pretence might be more pertinent to ToM development than its representational qualities. Thus, in the second study of the current thesis, pretence was re-examined in relation to ToM, though this time, the social engagement attributes of this activity were focussed on. A total of 50 children were tested on their language ability and false belief, while their mothers completed a questionnaire about their play behaviour with their closest-in-age sibling. The results suggested that only social pretend play was related to ToM, not solitary pretend play. Moreover, within the context of social pretence, only games that were likely to involve role play were found to be related to ToM, other themes of pretence were not. In combination, the results of Study 1 and 2 of the thesis gave limited support to the proposed association between pretend play and theory of mind. Only social, role-play pretence was found to be relevant. Given that role play pretence is known to involve negotiations of roles and plans of action, it was proffered that children’s conflictual interactions with their peers might be a more fruitful area to explore in relation to ToM development. Therefore, the third and fourth studies in this thesis shifted focus towards children’s conflict interactions. In the third study, 54 children were tested on their language ability and false belief performance, while their mothers concurrently completed a questionnaire about children’s conflict behaviours with their closest-in-age sibling. The emotional qualities of children’s disputes with their siblings served as the primary focus of investigation, though other elements such as overall frequency, diversity, and mode of resolution were also examined. The results suggested that children who were able to remain relatively calm emotionally, both during and at the end of their sibling disputes, had the most advanced ToM understanding. The interesting and novel findings of Study 3 prompted further investigation of conflict interactions in relation to ToM. In study 4, a sample of 69 children was examined. Parents completed a questionnaire about sibling and peer disputes conjointly, which included rating the emotional qualities of these disputes as well as their child’s reasoning strategies during these interactions. Children were tested on their language ability, ToM and executive functioning. The results of this final study indicated that children with more advanced reasoning styles performed better on tests of false belief, and contrary to Study 3, the emotional qualities of their disputes were not significantly related to false belief. However, there was significant overlap between children’s reasoning style and the emotional qualities of their peer and sibling disputes, in that, children who had more advanced reasoning abilities tended to have calmer emotions during their conflicts. A further, novel finding of study 4 was the fact that the association between children’s argument styles and their false belief performance was mediated by their executive functioning skills for inhibitory control. Strengths and limitations are addressed in the final general discussion chapter. It is concluded that, although the questionnaire procedure adopted in the current thesis requires further validation, and longitudinal follow on of the results are warranted, the current thesis has substantially added to the extant literature. It has done so by providing a thorough analysis of 2 uniquely childish social interactions in relation to ToM, and through consideration of mediational influences of inhibitory control on these associations. In achieving these aims, the current thesis has suggested that parent questionnaires show promise as a means of obtaining rich information about children’s social interactions