Thursday 23 July 11:25
- 12:55
Hall: 13 - Room 10 SA
Chair:
Castelli Ilaria
Discussant:
Marchetti Antonella
Division: Division 5: Education and School Psychology
Social competence plays a major role in human development, allowing children and adolescents to become active social partners. Theory of Mind (ToM), the ability to understand, explain and foresee the behavior based on mental states meta-representations, is a key component of social competence. ToM undergoes significant changes across developmental ages, and it is supported by the educational relationships within family and school settings. This Symposium addresses a relevant topic for applied psychology in the domain of human development and education, as it aims to focus on the cognitive and on the emotional components of ToM and to highlight how important school is for ToM development.
The first contribution shows how school learning is able to foster specific ToM skills, namely recursive and interpretive reasoning, which in turn are foundational to the development of scientific reasoning, with cross-cultural differences.
The second contribution deepens our knowledge about the relations among children's advanced ToM, emotional closeness with teachers, and social functioning at school (loneliness and social skills), with a longitudinal study.
The third contribution enriches our understanding of the acquisitional steps of II-order-recursive thinking, combining the mastering of true and false beliefs with positive and negative desires, through the employment of a novel scaling-ToM-task.
The last contribution moves attentions towards adolescence, studying how the way young people think of themselves as humble may play a critical role in their ability of mindreading and in social anxiety.
Overall, the novelty of this Symposium is set in the recent insights about ToM implications for social competence, in order to help those psychologists who work in schools and in socio-educational settings to address the profound challenges of social life, and to promote the wellbeing of children and adolescents.
