No abstract

Over the last two decades, it has been established that children's emotion understanding changes as they develop. Recent studies have also begun to address individual differences in children's emotion understanding. The first goal of this study was to examine the development of these individual differences across a wide age range with a test assessing nine different components of emotion understanding. The second goal was to examine the relation between language ability and individual differences in emotion understanding. Eighty children ranging in age from 4 to 11 years were tested. Children displayed a clear improvement with age in both their emotion understanding and language ability. In each age group, there were clear individual differences in emotion understanding and language ability. Age and language ability together explained 72% of emotion understanding variance; 20% of this variance was explained by age alone and 27% by language ability alone. The results are discussed in terms of their theoretical and practical implications.

Preschool LD trajectories were uniquely predicted from the integrative risk model of poor early communicative skills, family history and male gender. This might benefit identification of different LD trajectories by supporting broader severe vulnerability for persistent LD, milder vulnerability for transient LD, and possibly a specific risk for reading and learning difficulties for children with late-onset LD.

This study examines the contribution of children's linguistic ability and mothers' use of mental‐state language to young children's understanding of false belief and their subsequent ability to make belief‐based emotion attributions. In Experiment 1, children (N = 51) were given three belief‐based emotion‐attribution tasks. A standard task in which the protagonist was a story character and the emotional outcomes were imagined, and two videos in which the story protagonist was a real infant and the emotional outcomes were observable (high and low expressed emotion conditions). Children's verbal ability (semantic competence) was also measured. In Experiment 2, children (N = 75) were given two belief‐based emotion tasks: the standard story task and the high expressed emotion video. In addition, children's verbal ability (syntactic competence) and mothers' use of mental‐state attributes when describing their children were also measured. The results showed that: (1) the lag between understanding false belief and emotion attribution was a stable feature of children's reasoning across the three tests; and (2) children who were more linguistically advanced and whose mothers' described them in more mentalistic terms were more likely to understand the association between false belief and emotion. The findings underline the continuing importance of verbal ability and linguistic input for children's developing theory‐of‐mind understanding, even after they display an understanding of false belief.

In three experiments, children's reliance on other people's testimony as compared to their own, first-hand experience was assessed in the domain of ontology. Children ranging from 4 to 8 years were asked to judge whether five different types of entity exist: real entities (e.g. cats, trees) whose existence is evident to everyone; scientific entities (e.g. germs, oxygen) that are normally invisible but whose existence is generally presupposed in everyday discourse; endorsed beings (e.g. the Tooth Fairy, Santa Claus) whose existence is typically endorsed in discourse with young children; equivocal beings (e.g. monsters, witches) whose existence is not typically endorsed in discourse with young children; and impossible entities (e.g. flying pigs, barking cats) that nobody believes in. Children make a broad dichotomy between entities and beings that they claim to exist (real entities; scientific entities; and endorsed beings) and those whose existence they deny (equivocal beings and impossible entities). They also make a more fine-grained distinction among the invisible entities that they claim to exist. Thus, they assert the existence of scientific entities such as germs with more confidence than that of endorsed beings such as Santa Claus. The findings confirm that children's ontological claims extend beyond their first-hand encounters with instances of a given category. Children readily believe in entities that they cannot see for themselves but have been told about. Their confidence in the existence of those entities appears to vary with the pattern of testimony that they receive.