This research investigates the relationship between psychological understanding and positive social behavior in preschool children. A sample of 67 children were given measures of mental state understanding and emotion understanding. Positive social behavior was measured by classroom observation, teacher report and peer ratings. Both mental state understanding and emotion understanding were positively related to teacher ratings of social skills, behavioral observers' global ratings of social skills and peer popularity. When language ability was partialled out of these relationships, many of the significant correlations disappeared; however, for variables related to peers' perceptions, psychological understanding continued to predict unique variance. The results are discussed in terms of the multiple determinacy of positive social behaviors and the potential role of language in these processes.Keywords: theory of mind; social behavior; affective perspective taking; preschoolers Psychological understanding, or theory of mind, may be thought of as comprising two different kinds of understanding-understanding of mind (cognitive states like beliefs and desires) and understanding of emotions (emotional sensitivity to others) . Understanding of mind has traditionally been assessed using standard false belief tasks where the child is asked to predict or explain the behavior of an agent based on that agent's erroneous belief. Understanding of emotion has been mainly assessed using an affective perspective-taking task where the child is asked to identify the emotion of an agent based on a series of events which the agent has experienced. Recent research has begun to focus on individual differences in children's development of psychological understanding, and which cognitive and social factors are related to these differences. The current study investigates how individual differences in children's psychological understanding are related to one important component of the child's social world-their positive social behavior with other children.Recent evidence suggests that emotion understanding and mind understanding may be differentiated in the preschool years, as they have been shown to be uncorrelated

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This study examined whether books that are typically read to preschool children contain theory of mind concepts. The parents of 47 preschool children recorded books read by or to their child over a one-week period. The books were analyzed for theory of mind content. It was found that 78% of the books contained internal state language, 34% contained false beliefs, and 43% contained personality descriptors. Thus, theory of mind concepts appear to be an integral part of the literature read to preschool children. These results are discussed in light of recent work on individual differences in theory of mind development. Bruner (1990) argued that people use narrative as the basic form of human meaning-making and understanding; that is, people use narratives to explain or make sense of the actions of those around them. Bruner claimed that, in these narratives, people make sense of events by appealing to the subjective states of the participants, such as their hopes, desires, beliefs, feelings, etc. In other words, people use a folk psychology or theory of mind in a narrative form to understand others. Furthermore, Bruner proposed that "while we have an 'innate' and primitive predisposition to narrative organization . . . the culture soon equips us with new powers of narration through its tool kit and through the traditions of telling and interpreting in which we soon come to participate" (Bruner, 1990, p. 80).If the narrative form is basic to human meaning-making and if mental state ascription is essentially a part of that, we might expect that the narratives a culture provides its children would be richly endowed in culturally relevant instances that feature mental and emotional referents and explanations. One major source of these narratives for children is children's literature. Narratives read to children may provide important "training" for children in the task of understanding others' behaviors through the ascription of mental states. Therefore, it seems important to investigate systematically the nature of the narratives

This study investigated the relationship between preschool children's social-cognitive abilities (theory of mind and social information processing; SIP) and their observed physical and relational aggressive behaviour. Children with more advanced socialcognitive abilities engaged in fewer acts of physical aggression; however, much of the ability of the social-cognitive variables to predict physical aggression was shared with language ability. In addition, social-cognitive understanding moderated the connection between language ability and physical aggression. Exploratory examination of gender differences in patterns of association between physical aggression and the social cognitive understanding variables revealed that the relationships were only true for boys. Relational aggression was not associated with social cognitive ability for either boys or girls, but this is likely due to the low frequency of relationally aggressive behaviour observed in this sample.