Conversation on mental states at nursery: Promoting social cognition in early childhood

Abstract

Despite growing evidence that conversation on inner states fosters gains in children’s social cognition, this mechanism has yet to be tested with toddlers. To address this gap, we examined whether an intervention based on conversing about mental states with small groups of 2-year-old children at nursery had a significant effect on toddlers’ theory of mind (ToM) and emotion understanding (EU). Participants were 68 children (M_age at pre-test: 29.9 months) who were assigned to either an experimental or a control condition. Measures of verbal ability, ToM and EU were administered at pre-test, post-test and follow-up stages. Over a one-month intervention, all children were read a series of brief illustrated stories. After listening to the stories, the experimental group (n = 34) was involved in conversations on mental states, whereas the control group (n = 34) was engaged in conversation regarding the material entities and actions featured in the storybook. The experimental group significantly outperformed the control group on measures of both ToM and EU, independently of gains in verbal ability. Furthermore, these positive effects remained stable over time. We discuss the theoretical and practical implications of these findings.

Keywords:

• Mental-state talk
• conversational approach
• theory-of-mind
• emotion understanding
• social cognition
• training study

Acknowledgments

This research was partly funded by a grant from F.A.—2013 (University of Milano-Bicocca) to Prof. Ilaria Grazzani. We are very grateful to the nursery staff, the children and their families for participating in the study, and to Clare O’Sullivan for the linguistic revision of the manuscript.