Paper 2 - Developing an Identity - Development of Empathy and Theory of Mind (HL)

Theory of Mind

The ability to understand private mental states, processes, and knowledge in oneself and others.

Involves the ability to figure out what a person may believe, and predict others' behaviours, through inferring a person's motivation.

When we develop theory of mind, we are able to show empathy to others - the ability to identify with other people's emotions.

Symbolic play

When children pretend play it involves understanding and re-enacting others' perspectives.

Deception

Telling a lie or covering up something naughty involves intentionally instilling a false belief in another person's mind.

Reading comprehension

Theory of mind is needed for readers to make inferences and predictions, and understand characters' intentions and desires.

Narratives (written/verbal)

Providing narratives involves monitoring and maintaining the listener's attention, explaining characters' emotions, thoughts, and actions, and shifting between two characters' perspectives in the story.

Pre-theory of mind (part of 4 stages of theory of mind)

The first year of a child's life involves three key components related to attention and understanding others.

1. Gaze following: where a child tracks where someone is looking, indicating shared attention.

2. Protodeclarative pointing: where a child points at the same object as another person, showing awareness of shared focus. 3. "seeing leads to knowing": where a child understands that if someone sees something, they know about it (e.g., knowing an adult is aware a cake is in the fridge if they saw it placed there). These abilities lay the foundation for developing theory of mind.

Desire stage

Between 12 and 24 months, as language develops, children begin to detect desires in others and empathize. For example, when shown a picture of a crying boy and a girl with a kitten, they can explain that the boy is upset because he wants to play with the kitten. At this stage, children recognize mental states in themselves and others but assume others share their own desires and beliefs. They also start understanding deception, though not very effectively, and can keep secrets, realizing it can lead to surprises.

Belief-desire stage

Begins around three years of age.

When children are able to make mental representations of the world. At this stage, children understand that people have beliefs as well as desires that may be different from their own.

Representational stage

Begins at around four years of age.

At this stage, children are interacting more directly with other children in play activities.

They understand that a person's beliefs may be false.

Children realize that what they see and know may not be what others see and know.

How does theory of mind develop?

Two theories:

1. 'Theory' theory - Through observing the world, children gather data about the world around them by developign schemas that help them to make predictions about other people's behaviors.

- Meta representations - children's ability to use symbols to represent something 'real', helping them to understand how others also use symbols.

2. Simulation theory - Argues we are biologically designed to understand other people. Rather than learning about other people's mental representations, simulation theory argues we understand others by comparing them to ourselves.

- Mirror neurons - activated by observing someone carrying out a behavior, enabling us to develop empathy.

Borke aim

To investigate possible class and cultural differences in the development of empathy.

Borke method

Sample of 288 American and 288 Chinese children living in Taiwan aged 3-6 years old.

Half were from middle class families and half were from disadvantaged families.

The children were told two sets of stories which described scenarios in whcih the child might do something to cause another child to feel happy, afraid, sad or angry.

Each scenario was accompanies by a picture of a child with a blank face: the chldren were asked to complete the pictures by selecting the face the best showed how the child in the story felt.

Borke results

Even the youngest of the American and Chinese children demonstrated some basis similarities in correctly identifying scnarios that might produce happy or unhappy responses in other people. The researched found that social class and culture also play a key role in empathy development: middle class Chinese 3 year olds could identify fearful situations more accurately than Chinese lower-class or American middle-class children aged three. The Chinese children were also better at recognising sad scenarios and both the Chinese and American children were slow to anger.

Borke conclusion

Very young chidlren are capable of showing empathy. Indeed, empathy may be a basic human response which crosses cultures because it may be necessary for the continues survival of our species. This supports the theory of mind, which enables individuals to recognize others' thoughts and emotions. As a universal trait, empathy may have evolved to promote prosocial behavior and group survival, highlighting its fundamental role in human interaction.

Borke evaluation

+ The cross sectional design of the study and the relatively large cross cultural sample make the results representative of their target populations, making it easier to generalize the findings. The results point to their being a universal response to emotional situations which are not defined by culture, highlighting an important idea: empathy may be an adapative (and innate) behavior.

- The way in which empathy and other emotional responses were measured in this study is artificial and may not reflect how the children experiences these emotions in real life; therefore, teh study lacks externala validity. It could be the case that researcher bias confounded the results to some extent. This might occur if the children's responses were misinterpreted by the researchers, or if confirmation bisa played a role. Therefore, this research might not be sufficient to suggest empathy is a universal or adaptive trait.

Baren Cohen et al. aim

To investigate theory of mind in autistic children.

Baren Cohen method

20 children with ASD with a mean age of 11; 14 children with Down's syndromes with a mean age of 10; 27 normal children with a mean age of 4.5. Each child was given the false belief Sally-Anne task, the dependent variable being their belief response: whether they believed that Sally would look for the marble.

The Sally-Anne task involves presenting the following scenario: Sally and Anne are two dolls. Sally hides a marble in her basket; Anne is in the room with her when she does this. Sally leaves the room. While Sally is gone, Anne hides the marble in her box. Sally comes back into the room, and she can't find her marble. Where will she look for it? If a child does not have theory of mind, they will say Sally will look for the marble in the box where Anne has hidden it - demonstrating they think Sally knows what they know.

Baren Cohen results

23/27 of the normal children and 12/14 of the Down's syndrome children correctly identified as the location where Sally would look for the marble. Only 4/20 autistic children passed the test, meaning 16/20 said Sally would look for the marble in the box where Anne had hidden it.

Baren Cohen conclusion

Children with ASD may lack theory of mind, impacting their ability to understand others' thoughts, emotions, and intentions. Since theory of mind is closely linked to empathy, this difficulty may explain challenges in social interaction and communication. Their findings support the idea that theory of mind is important for developing empathy and navigating social relationships effectively.

Baren Cohen evaluation

+ The use of two control groups, one of which consisted of children with a genetic disability (Down's syndrome), meaning the results can be compared. This means the researchers can be confident that it is theory of mind that has produed the difference in results, rather than IQ levels of memory (the participants were all asked a memory question as a control to ensure this did not confound the results). The use of the Sally-Anne tasks was replicated across the 3 groups, which gives the findings some reliability.

- The inability to pass the Sally-Anne task might not be entirely due to a lack of theory of mind - it could be other cognitive biases. For example, egocentrism. It is also possible some children may have theory of mind, but are unable to pass the false belief task, impacting the validity of the findings.

Overall evaluation of theory of mind/empathy

+ It's application to understanding autism. The tests use to assess ToM (false belief tasks) are challenging for some autistic people, possibly because they may not fully understand what other people are thinking. This in turn offers an explanation for why some autistic people find social interaction difficult - it is hard to interact with someone if you don't get a sense of what they are thinking and feeling. This means that ToM has real world relevance.

- However, ToM does not provide a complete explanation for autism. Not every autistic person experiences ToM issues (e.g. not always understanding what someone else is thinking). Nor are To< problems limited to autistic people (Tager-Flusberg 2007). Also, a lack of ToM cannot explain the cognitive strengths of autistic people (for example, having superior visual attention). This means there must be other factors involve in autism, and the association between autism and ToM is not as strong as first believed.