Abstract
This study examined the influence of younger siblings on children’s understanding of second-order false belief. In a representative community sample of firstborn children (N=229) with a mean age of 7years (SD=4.58), false belief was assessed during a home visit using an adaptation of a well-established second-order false belief narrative enacted with Playmobil figures. Children’s responses were coded to establish performance on second-order false belief questions. When controlling for verbal IQ and age, the existence of a younger sibling predicted a twofold advantage in children’s second-order false belief performance, yet this was the case only for firstborns who experienced the arrival of a sibling after their second birthday. These findings provide a foundation for future research on family influences on social cognition.
Highlights
Studies finding no effect of younger siblings may have lacked sufficient statistical power to detect smaller effects once samples are separated into sibling constellation groups. ‘‘Only child” subsamples typically are small (Miller, 2013)
Children who were older at the time of testing, Wald statistic = 4.21, p < .05, odds ratio (OR) = 1.08, 95% confidence interval (CI) = 1.00–1.16, and those who had higher verbal IQ scores, Wald statistic = 7.17, p < .01, OR = 1.04, 95% CI = 1.01–1.07, performed significantly better on second-order false belief; age and verbal IQ were used as covariates in the subsequent analysis
When predictors of second-order false belief understanding were controlled, children with a younger sibling living in the home were twice as likely to succeed on a second-order false belief task
Summary
Individual differences in children’s development of theory of mind (ToM), defined as the ‘‘understanding of mental states, what we know or believe about thoughts, desires, emotions, and other psychological entities both in ourselves and in others” A.L. Paine et al / Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 166 (2018) 251–265 been explored using the false belief task (Perner & Wimmer, 1983). Passing false belief tasks has been found to be related to children’s language (Astington & Jenkins, 1999) and executive function (Carlson & Moses, 2001)
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