| Summary: | At preschool, children are socially active--they engage in various social interactions with their peers and teachers. Social interactions require people to understand others’ minds (e.g., perspectives, ideas, emotional states, thoughts, intentions, beliefs), and this ability is often referred as a theory of mind or social cognition. Studies in the last few decades have revealed that young children are capable of understanding another’s mind, and preschool aged children show progressively better understanding of another’s thoughts and feelings (e.g., Fabes, Eisenberg, Nyman, & Michealieu, 1991; Harris, 1989; Pons, Harris, & de Rosnay, 2004; Selman, 1980; Wellman, Cross, & Watson, 2001). Though more evidence is available about young children’s theory-of-mind ability, little is known about their theory-of-mind patterns and their own emotional and behavioral response patterns in social interactions. Moreover, how children’s theory-of-mind patterns differ between different age groups, cultural groups, and social situations is not well understood. The main purpose of this study is to gain better understanding of how children attribute another’s mind in common social interactions at preschool. Given that children’s conflicts are quite common and teachers often get involved in such situations at preschool, preschool children of two age groups (a younger group: 3;10 to 5 years, an older group: 5;1 to 6;5 years) from two countries, Iceland (N = 41) and Japan (N = 64), were interviewed and instructed to take the first-person perspective in four hypothetical situations. They were asked about three aspects of their social information processing in the hypothetical social situations--their inference about the teacher’s feeling, the protagonist’s emotional reaction, and his/her subsequent action. These four hypothetical social situations involved a protagonist, a crying friend, and a teacher, in which the protagonist either did (e.g., the child pushes the friend, and the friend falls down) or did not make a moral ...
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