Emotional Understanding Of The Mentally Retarded Children's Theory Of Mind Development Research

Theory of mind (Theory of mind, referred to as ToM) refers to one's awareness and understanding of his/her and others mental states, and one's ability to predict and explain the corresponding behabior related to these mental states. Mental states mainly include desire, intent, beliefs, emotions and so on. Emotion understanding is defined as the consciousness of the emotional process (such as:emotional state and emotion regulation), or the awareness of how emotion play its role. Emotion is an important part of the individual psychological experience.And then, providing the foundation for the emotional communication and the establishment of social relationships, emotion understanding, an important part of theory of mind, is a good response indicator for individual development and social adaptation.This study aimed to investigate the developmental level and relationship of children with intellectual disabilities in the desire and false belief understanding and emotion understanding, and compared with normal children to find similarities and differences from children's development model between two types.68 children from a kindergarten in Nanjing and 59 mentally retarded children from Nanjing three special education schools were selected as subjects and responded to the our experiment.Following conclusions can be drawed from our experimental results:(1) 8 to 19-year-old children with intellectual disabilities can identify happy, sad and angry facial expressions, however can not identify the surprised expression.(2) The development of the ability of desire and false belief understanding and emotion understanding in the 8 to 19 years of age increased gradually with age. Meanwhile, the performance of desire and false belief understanding was affected by the type of story context (the object conversing context and the unexpected transfer context; the positive changing to negative emotions context and the negative changing to positive emotion context). Age and IQ have a significant impact on the desire and false belief understanding and emotion understanding tasks.(3) The desire and false belief understanding of children with intellectual disabilities was highly correlated with emotion understanding. There was significant correlation between desire understanding and emotion understanding based on the desire. Significant correlations as well can be found among the understanding of false belief and the recognition of surprise and emotion understanding based on the belif. (4) The most of 8 to 19-year-old children with intellectual disabilities can not complete the task of conflicting emotion, and the ability to understand the synchronal conflicting emotion was in its infancy during this period.