Theory of Mind, Mental State Talk and Social Outcomes at School

Theory of mind (ToM) can be defined as the ability to understand others as independent mental beings with subjective thoughts, desires, and beliefs. Extant research indicates that individual differences in children’s ToM are associated with child-reported social outcomes in the early years of school, including popularity within the peer group (Slaughter et al., 2015), and the formation of reciprocal friendships (e.g., Fink et al., 2014; 2020). However, the behavioural mechanisms that might underpin these associations remain underexplored. One possible behavioural mechanism is the use of mental state talk (MST, e.g., Hughes and Dunn, 1997), which may facilitate positive peer-peer relations by enabling children to share ideas, clarify intentions, and sustain harmonious and cooperative interactions. Extant research indicates concurrent and longitudinal links between children’s MST in mother-child contexts and teacher-reported social outcomes at school (Carr et al., 2018; Baretto et al., 2018). However, to our knowledge, no studies have yet examined how children’s MST in peer contexts relates to the classroom-based peer relationships as reported by children. This is an oversight because the use of adult-reported social measures in studies means results may not accurately reflect how MST use influences children’s perceptions of each other as playmates. Furthermore, children’s use of MST has been shown to vary across different types of interactional partner (Brown et al., 1996), suggesting that mother-child MST might not be a good proxy for their communication with peers. Taken together, these considerations highlight a need to examine how MST use within peer contexts impacts child-reported peer relationships in order to better understand the role of this behaviour within their social worlds.