Minimal coherence among varied theory of mind measures in childhood and adulthood

Abstract

for their assistance.

The sense of should: A biologically-based framework for modeling social pressure

“…Mental inference, then, may involve the coordinated usage of a collection of proficiencies and cognitive processes (Apperly, 2012;Gerrans & Stone, 2008;Schaafsma et al, 2015;Warnell & Redcay, 2019). Interactive inference may be one component of mental inference, but we hypothesize that it works in conjunction with (at a minimum) prior knowledge, such as dispositional and situational inferences (and their permutations, e.g.…”

“…We use the term mental inference to stand in for all of these inferences about others' expectations, with the caveat that others' expectations may be formulated as high-level, abstract predictions about mental states, as low-level, concrete predictions about behaviors, or as predictions at any level of abstraction in between (Kozak et al, 2006;Vallacher & Wegner, 1987). There are many competing accounts of mental inference, and most likely a number of underlying proficiencies and/or cognitive processes that combine to facilitate it (Apperly, 2012;Gerrans & Stone, 2008;Schaafsma et al, 2015;Warnell & Redcay, 2019), but the core problem that accounts of mental inference aim to solve is this: How do people make inferences about others' minds (i.e. predictions generated by others' internal models) 13 , given that others' internal models cannot be directly observed.…”

“…Having knowledge of these mental representations (and reasoning about them) is typically referred to as having a "theory of mind" (Premack & Woodruff, 1978). However, recent work has shown poor correlations in theory of mind measures across development (Warnell & Redcay, 2019), and cross-cultural work has demonstrated that explicit inferences about mental states are most frequent in Western societies (Duranti, 2008;Gendron et al, 2014;McNamara et al, 2018). In this paper, we avoid the term "theory of mind" and its implication that mental states are propositional representations, instead using "mental inference" to refer more generally to inferences about others' predictions about Amelia's behavior at all levels of abstraction (i.e.…”

Measurement Schmeasurement: Questionable Measurement Practices and How to Avoid Them

“…There is clear evidence of jingle in the literature, highlighting the need to address questions of what constructs are and how they are measured at the individual study level. To list just a few: depression scales (Fried, 2017), emotion measurement (Weidman et al, 2016), behavioral tasks vs. self-reports of self-regulation (Eisenberg et al, 2019), theory of mind (Warnell & Redcay, 2019), and fear extinction retention (Lonsdorf et al, 2019) each measure different content and phenomena under the same construct name. The on-going debate as to whether measures of grit (perseverance and passion for long-term goals) and conscientiousness capture the same construct, given their correlation of 0.84 in a recent large meta-analysis (Credé et al, 2017), is a case of potential jangle.…”

Gender differences in the association between theory of mind, empathy and conduct disorder: A cross-sectional study

“…The concept of "theory of mind" was used by the primatologists Premack and Woodruff (1978) to describe the skills for interpreting human behaviour in a mental sphere, in other words, the abilities of a person to infer and make assumptions regarding other people's emotions, feelings, affections, thoughts and intentions, and in turn, to act and influence their behaviour depending on these assumptions. According to Warnell and Redcay (2019), depending on the perspective to evaluate the theory of mind skills (task complexity, affective content or implicit or explicit responses) and population groups by age (pre-schoolers, children or adults), the results of said measurement will produce highly variable and poorly related data. Based on the above, this study assumes that ToM is a multidimensional process, but only one dimension will be evaluated from the perspective of affective content that reflects the recognition of emotional states from an adolescent's point of view.…”