Indian Journal of Positive Psychology

Simran Bedi ¹, Nandita Babu ²

Affiliations
1 Clinical Psychologist, Masina Hospital, Mumbai, IN
2 Department Psychology, North Campus, Delhi, IN

Abstract

Theory of mind (TOM), or the ability to make inferences about the mental states of other people is thought to be the proximate mechanism underlying human's ability to function in complex collaborative social networks. Here we present a set of stories and questions for investigating higher order theory of mind functioning in school age children, and also a scale for obtaining ratings of children's social competence. Accordingly, the purpose of this study is to assess TOM in adolescents and to determine whether individual differences in this mentalizing ability relate to social competence. It was hypothesized that adolescent's ability to understand thoughts and emotions in others would be associated with their social competence. 80 adolescent (40 class 11th students and 40 class 9th students; mean age 16-14) completed peer social competence ratings and participated in a social understanding (TOM) interview. Parent's ratings of the participants' social competence were also collected. Based on composite TOM scores, results indicated positive associations between TOM and peer and parents ratings of social interaction skills.

Keywords

Theory Ofmind (TOM), Social Competence, Mental Theory

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Nandita babu ¹, Subhasmita Panda ¹

Affiliations
1 Department of Psychology, University of Delhi, Delhi, IN

Abstract

How do we understand each other? As social beings, one of the most important tasks for people is to develop social and communicative skills in order to interact with other people. Almost always, in social worlds, we take into account and try to understand other people's feelings, desires, beliefs, intentions and motivations based on our own “theory of mind”. Theory of mind enables us to explain and predict other people's behavior and appropriately responds to them in relationships. It involves an understanding that people have mental states including thoughts, beliefs, and desires. Children's knowledge about the mind is a foundational domain of social-cognitive development and by 4 to 5 years of age most children have acquired an understanding of mind. That is, children around this age are able to understand a person's action in terms of that person's desires, thoughts, beliefs and emotions. Developing a theory of mind is important because it enables children to interact appropriately with others. It enables children, as they grow, to acquire more complicated socio-cognitive skills such as perspective taking, collaboration, recursive thought. This ability allows to interpret the behaviors of others in everyday social interaction. Theory of mind understanding is intricately related to language. In this paper the importance of Theory of mind in children's social interaction is being highlighted.

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