Theory Of Mind Development Of 3-year-old Children And Other Effect Factors

Theory of mind is a broad term that conveys the idea of understanding social interaction by attributing beliefs, desires, intentions, and emotions to people. And the research of children's theory of mind is focus on when and how preschool children could know well about it.Seventy-six 3-year-olds were tested by two standard tasks in order to assess the possession of the theory of mind. One is the change-in-location false-belief task and the other is familiar box with its usual contents task. We also tested whether they told a lie or not in the temptation resistance situation and some factors which may influence the development of children's theory of mind which includes IQ scores, children's temperament, the pattern of children's behaviors and parents' educational behaviors.Through these experiments, we found:(1) 3-year-old children could understand the false-belief question but could not understand the representational change question.(2) 3-year-old children could understand false-belief better in lie-telling situation than theory-of-mind standard tests.(3) The better the performance in the false-belief task was, the more possible 3-year-old children had to deny one's wrongdoing in the temptation resistance situation.(4) There were no finding in the relations between theory of mind standard test scores and some other factors including children's gender, IQ, temperament, the pattern of behavior, population of family, et al. But negative correlation between the theory of mind standard tasks scores and parents' rejective educational behaviors was found.