The Study On The Development Of Young Children's "Theory Of Mind " And Relations Among ToM, Peer Acceptance And Social Behavior

This study probed into the development of ToM and relations among ToM peer acceptance and social behavior of 3- 5 year-old children. In this study, 123 young children who were selected in 10 classes from three kindergartens provided peer nominations that allowed determination of social preference and social impact scores, and classification in one of four peer status groups: popular, rejected, neglected and average. Head teachers in each classroom were asked to complete a Social Behavioural Questionnaire for each child participating in the study, according to their everyday behaviors in kindergartens. Then these children were tested on their ToM ability one by one using four types ToM tasks. That verbal ability has potential influence on ToM ability was taken into account, "language-narration" and "language-vocabulary" of PSSC-CCR were used to evaluate verbal ability of each child. The study focused on three topics as follows: 1.The develepment characteristics of young children's ToM, peer acceptance and social behavior; 2.The relationships among ToM,peer acceptance and social behavior, as well as their relations after verbal scores were cotrolled ; 3.Investigation into the influence of ToM, verbal ability and social behaviors on peer acceptance in preschoolers, in order to predict social preference and social impact. The results are showed as the following:1. Young children's performance in ToM of 4.5 and 5 year-old children is better than that of 3 and 4 year-old ones significantly; the performance of 4 year-old children is better than that of 3 year-old ones significantly. The results showed that 3 year-old children lack of ToM ability generally,and 4 year-old children begin to show it.2. There is great difference of young children's performance in various ToM tasks, they pass various tasks in the sequence of time, which might suggest that their performance is evidently task-specific. Furthmore there is some potential coherence of performance in four tasks.3. There is a close correlation between children's ToM ability and verbal intelligence, there is a significant difference of ToM ability between the two groups which verbal scores are the highest and the lowest.4.The children's social preference scores are significantly increasing with theirgrowth, and the girls' are significantly higher than the boys'; 3 year-old children's social impact scores are greatly higher than 4-5 year-old children's.5. Young children's prosocial behaviors are becoming significantly more with their growth, and the girls' are much more than the boys', but the boys' aggressive behaviors are much more than the girls'.6. Popular children are found to score the highest in ToM tasks, the average score secondly, the neglected, the rejected score the lowest. The covariance analysis with verbal scores controlled reveals that verbal ability has a significantly main effect on ToM, but peer status has no independent effect on ToM and interaction between them is insignificant. The correlation analysis shows that there is significantly positive correlation between young children's ToM and social preference, and partial correlation is still significant after verbal scores and age were controlled.7. Popular children's prosocial behaviors are much more than other groups, but rejected children's aggressive behaviors are more than other groups. The correlation analysis reveals that there is a significantly positive correlation between prosocial behavior and social preference, as well as social impact respectively; there is a significantly negative correlation between aggressive behavior and social preference, but there is a significantly positive correlation between aggressive behavior and social impact; there is a significantly negative correlation between withdrawing behavior and social impact. Partial correlations are still significant even verbal scores and age were controlled.8. There is a significantly positive correlation between the children's ToM and prosocial behavior, and a significantly negative correla...