title: Theory of Mind and Executive Function in Middle Childhood: A Cross-Cultural Comparison Between Chinese and Australian School-Aged Children
Creators: name: Wang, Si
Publisher: name: Griffith University
Year: 2021
Subjects: subject: Theory of Mind (ToM)
subject: Chinese
subject: Children
subject: Faux Pas
subject: Reading Mind in the Eyes (RMIE)
subject: Australian
subject: parenting practices
subject: sibling
subject: executive function (EF)

description: Theory of Mind (ToM) is the ability to attribute mental states, including knowledge, beliefs, and intentions to oneself and to others (Premack &amp; Woodruff, 1978). It is crucial to investigate ToM because of its central importance in everyday social communication and interactions (Baron-Cohen, 1999). Most previous studies have focused on ToM in pre-schoolers (Liu et al., 2008; Wellman et al., 2001). Although ToM continues to develop into middle childhood (Miller, 2009), little is known about school-aged children’s ToM across cultures. Therefore, the present study aimed to clarify age-related differences of school-aged children’s ToM and its sociocultural correlates and underlying cognitive mechanisms in two cultural samples of 5.5 - to 12-year-old children from China (n = 126) and Australia (n = 83). The overall project has been broken into three studies. Study 1 assessed Chinese and Australian children’s ToM using four measures, which reflect three categories: cognitive ToM (Interpretive ToM [IToM]), affective ToM (Faux Pas and Reading Mind in the Eyes [RMIE]), and mixed task (Strange Stories). The results revealed that younger children aged from 5.5 to 7 years in both cultural groups performed worse than older children aged from 8 to 11 years on all measures. Australian children outperformed Chinese children on both RMIE and Strange Stories. In contrast, no cultural differences were found in children’s scores on IToM and Faux Pas. However, an analysis of types of errors on the two tasks reflected cultural influences. Chinese children made more reality/contamination errors in the IToM task than Australian children, whereas 10- to 12-year-old Australian children made more identical responses than their Chinese age cohorts. Moreover, Australian children made fewer errors in Faux Pas identification than Chinese children. Study 2 examined how parenting practices and sibling composition influenced ToM across cultures. The results revealed that corporal punishment negatively predicted Australian and marginally predicted Chinese (p = .06) children’s performance on Strange Stories. Moreover, compared to Study 1, the results of Study 2 showed that Chinese children outperformed Australian children on IToM after controlling the number of same-sex siblings, and there was no cultural difference in IToM reality/contamination errors after controlling the parent-reported frequency of corporal punishment. Study 3 investigated how specific executive function (EF) components (inhibition, working memory, and cognitive flexibility) contributed to ToM. The results reveal that Chinese children showed similar spatial working memory, better inhibition control, and poorer cognitive flexibility compared to their Australian age cohorts. Distinct relations between separate EF components and children’s ToM measured were revealed in different tasks. While no EF components predicted children’s IToM overall scores, inhibition control was a significant positive predictor of Faux Pas and RMIE, and cognitive flexibility significantly predicted children’s performance on Strange Stories. Notably, the significant EF component in each task did not alter the existing cultural differences of ToM. The current findings supported the emergence account (Carlson &amp; Moses, 2001) of the EF-ToM link in middle childhood. This research contributes to the literature of school-aged children’s ToM in three ways: (1) providing a comprehensive picture of cognitive and affective ToM from a cross-cultural perspective; (2) improving understandings of the roles of sibling composition and parenting practices in ToM; and (3) clarifying theoretical accounts of ToM-EF links.