Empirical Article Understanding of Emotions and False Beliefs Among Hearing Children Versus Deaf Children

Emotion understanding and theory of mind (ToM) are two major aspects of social cognition in which deaf children dem-onstrate developmental delays. The current study investi-gated these social cognition aspects in two subgroups of deaf children—those with cochlear implants who communicate orally (speakers) and those who communicate primarily using sign language (signers)—in comparison to hearing children. Participants were 53 Israeli kindergartners—20 speakers, 10 signers, and 23 hearing children. Tests included four emotion identification and understanding tasks and one false belief task (ToM). Results revealed similarities among all children’s emotion labeling and affective perspective taking abilities, similarities between speakers and hearing children in false beliefs and in understanding emotions in typical contexts, and lower performance of signers on the latter three tasks. Adapting educational experiences to the unique characteris-tics and needs of speakers and signers is recommended. Emotion understanding and theory of mind (ToM) are two major aspects of social cognition (Brown & Dunn, 1996; LaBounty, Wellman, & Olson, 2008; Laible & Tompson, 1998) in which deaf1 children reveal develop-mental delays compared to hearing children (Peterson, Wellman, & Slaughter, 2012; Rieffe, Terwogt, & Smit, 2003). The objective of the current study was to inves-tigate these two major aspects of social cognition in two subgroups of deaf children—those with coch-lear implants who communicate orally (speakers) and those who communicate primarily using sign language (signers)—in comparison to hearing children. The study aimed to increase our understanding regarding the strengths and difficulties of deaf children in emo-tion understanding and in ToM