TheRelationshipBetween.PDF

The Relationship Between Psychological Understanding and Positive Social Behaviors Kimberly Wright Cassidy, Rebecca Stetson Werner, Mary Rourke and Lynn S. Zubernis, Bryn Mawr College, and Geetha Balaraman, University of Pittsburgh Abstract 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 signi?cant 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 behav- iors 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) (Dunn, 1995). 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 iden- tify the emotion of an agent based on a series of events which the agent has experi- enced. Recent research has begun to focus on individual differences in children’s d