Abstract
Social cognition is the way in which people process, remember, and use information in social contexts to explain and predict their own behavior and that of others. Children’s social cognition may be influenced by multiple factors, both external and internal to the child. In the current study, two aspects of social cognition were examined: Theory of Mind and Emotion Understanding. The aim of this study was to analyze the effects of type of early care (0–3 years of age), maternal education, parents’ country of birth, and child’s language on the social cognition of 118 Italian preschoolers. To our knowledge, the joint effect of these variables on social cognition has not previously been investigated in the literature. The measures used to collect social cognition and linguistic data were not parent- or teacher-reports, but based on direct assessment of the children through two standardized tests, the Test of Emotion Comprehension and the ToM Storybooks. Relationships among the variables showed a complex pattern. Overall, maternal education and linguistic competence showed a systematic effect on social cognition; the linguistic competence mediated the effect of maternal education. In children who had experienced centre-base care in the first 3 years of life, the effect of maternal education disappeared, supporting the protective role of centre-base care for children with less educated mothers. The children with native and foreign parents did not significantly differ on the social cognition tasks. Limits of the study, possible educational outcomes and future research lines were discussed.
Highlights
Social cognition is the way in which individuals process, remember, and use information in social contexts to explain and predict how people behave (Fiske and Taylor, 2013)
The current study focused on some factors, both external and internal to the child that can influence social cognition abilities in a group of Italian pre-schoolers: the role of early type of care on Theory of Mind (ToM) and Emotion Understanding (EU) has been examined together with the effects of other intervening variables as maternal education, parents’ country of birth, and linguistic competence
Type of early childcare did not lead to significant differences in ToM and EU and the effect size was not relevant as well (Table 2)
Summary
Social cognition is the way in which individuals process, remember, and use information in social contexts to explain and predict how people behave (Fiske and Taylor, 2013). ToM concerns the attribution of mental states (beliefs, desires, intentions, etc.) to oneself and others, and the ability to use these attributions to understand, predict and explain one’s own behavior and that of other people (Mitchell, 1997). EU, on the other hand, is a component of social cognition and emotional competence, which concerns how individuals understand, predict, and explain their own and others’ emotions (Harris, 1989; Denham, 1998; Saarni, 1999). In Wellman’s (1990) approach, basic ToM in childhood consists of five components: recognition of emotion expressions and external causes of emotion, understanding of desire and beliefs, ability to distinguish between physical and mental entities, and awareness of the link between perception and knowledge.
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