Are Emotion and Mind Understanding Differently Linked to Young Children's Social Adjustment? Relationships Between Behavioral Consequences of Emotions, False Belief, and SCBE

ABSTRACT

According to empirical findings, emotional knowledge and false belief understanding seem to be differently linked to social adjustment. However, whereas false belief is assessed through the capacity to identify its behavioral consequences, emotion tasks usually rely on the comprehension of facial expressions and of the situational causes of emotions. The authors examined if the documented relationship between social adjustment and emotion knowledge in children extends to the understanding of behavioral consequences of emotions. Eighty French-speaking preschoolers undertook false belief and consequence-of-emotion tasks. Their social adjustment was measured by the Social Competence and Behavior Evaluation. Children's language ability, their parent's level of education, and the familial socioeconomic score were taken into account. Results showed that children's social adjustment was significantly predicted by their knowledge of emotion, but not by their understanding of false belief. The findings confirm the special status of emotion among mental states for social adaptation and specify which dimensions of adaptation to peers and adults are predicted by the child's emotion understanding. They also suggest that the distinction between mind and emotion understanding may be conceptual rather than methodological.

Keywords:

• emotion understanding
• false belief
• preschool children
• social adjustment

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Preliminary data were presented at the 18th biennial conference of the International Society for the Study of Behavioral Development, July 2004, in Ghent, Belgium. This study was supported by a grant from the Fonds québécois de la recherche sur la société et la culture (FQRSC) to Joane Deneault and by a grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) to Marcelle Ricard.

Notes

Pictures drawn by Rachel Ménard

Following this study, whose partial results were presented in 2004 (Deneault, Morin, Quintal, Ricard, & Gouin Décarie, 2004), Thirion-Marrisiaux and Nader-Grosbois (2008) used the SCBE to evaluate social competence and its link to false belief and emotion understanding in cognitively disabled children and adolescents.

Children were recruited from a larger sample participating in a research on sibship. Since this variable had no effect on the performance at false belief and emotion tasks, children from different sibships were regrouped in this study.

For the original French version of the scripts, see Quintal (2001); see also Gouin Décarie, Quintal, Ricard, Deneault, and Morin (2005), where preliminary results of the consequences of emotion task administered to 40 subjects were presented.

This article presents the validation of the long form on a French-speaking population, but see LaFrenière and Dumas (1995 short form; 1996 long form) for a validation of SCBE with English-speaking children.

For all scales, a high score means a positive social adjustment. Thus, a high score at the internalizing problems scale refers to a minimum of internalizing problems while a high score at the dependent-autonomous scale refers to a high degree of autonomy (LaFrenière & Dumas, 1995).