Temperament Dimensions in Preschool Children: Links With Cognitive and Affective Theory of Mind     

Emiddia Longobardi  Pietro Spataro  Marta D’Alessandro  Rita Cerutti 《Early education and development》2017,28(4):377-395

Research Findings: The present cross-sectional study investigated the question of whether 6 different temperament dimensions (inhibition to novelty, social orientation, motor activity, positive emotionality, negative emotionality, and attention) influenced cognitive and affective theory of mind (ToM) in 168 children (86 three/four-year-olds and 82 four/five-year-olds). Temperament was measured via a parent-report questionnaire, cognitive ToM via a classical false-belief task, and affective ToM via a comprehensive test tapping 3 levels of emotion comprehension (external, mental, and reflexive). In addition, language competence was assessed with a direct test evaluating both receptive and expressive language. The results showed that after we controlled for language ability, inhibition to novelty predicted higher levels of cognitive ToM in 4/5-year-old children. In addition, higher levels of social orientation predicted better comprehension of the external aspects of emotion in both younger and older children. Practice or Policy: Our results highlight the importance of the early identification of less sociable children, who might benefit from training interventions aimed at increasing their affective ToM abilities. At the same time, they are also consistent with previous evidence indicating that an inhibited approach to social interaction can promote false-belief understanding.  相似文献   

Comparing fictional,personal, and hypothetical narratives in primary school: story grammar and mental state language     

Emiddia Longobardi  Pietro Spataro  Marialuisa Renna  Clelia Rossi-Arnaud 《European Journal of Psychology of Education - EJPE》2014,29(2):257-275

The present study examined the use of narrative categories and mental state words in the fictional, personal, and hypothetical stories written by 150 children in the third, fourth, and fifth grades of primary school. There were three main results. First, children were better able to write fictional and hypothetical than personal stories, when considering the total number of narrative categories and the percentages of stories including at least one complete episode. Second, there was clear evidence of differentiation between the three tasks, both in terms of narrative categories and mental state language. Third, the use of mental state words correlated with the frequency of subordinate propositions and the number of narrative categories included in the stories. These findings support the hypothesis of a bidirectional interaction between lexical and syntactic development and suggest that narrative writing involves metalinguistic abilities directly related to the spontaneous use of psychological lexicon. Educational implications are discussed.  相似文献   

Handwriting,spelling, and narrative competence in the fictional stories of Italian primary-school children     

Longobardi  Emiddia  Spataro  Pietro  Pizzicannella  Emiliano 《European Journal of Psychology of Education - EJPE》2018,33(2):277-293

European Journal of Psychology of Education - Previous studies with English-speaking children showed that handwriting and spelling abilities played a critical role in the development of writing...  相似文献