Thursday 23 July 15:40 - 17:10

Hall: 16 - Room 13 SA

Chair: Castano Emanuele

Division: Division 2: Psychological Assessment and Evaluation

Communication skills, intelligence, self-control, and mindreading are among the
crucial cognitive and behavioral skills scaffolding life in human societies. How do these
changes throughout the lifespan? This is the central question of the symposium, which is
organized chronologically with five contributions covering the entire human lifespan. The
symposium aptly starts two presentations with data from infants: evidence from South Korea
suggests early emergence of the complex interplay of reasoning and communication
processes in the emergence of attribution of beliefs and intentions. Next, data from Japan
looks at the codevelopment of interoception and mentalizing and its relation with maternal
interoceptive. The third presentation focuses instead on children of age 6-14, and reports
results from a research intervention conducted in Italian schools in which the impact of a
shared reading aloud program on the development of intelligence in children is highlighted.
The next two presentations shift the focus from the development occurring in the
infancy/childhood years to what happens to human psychology later in life. First, data from
Japan are presented suggesting that the effect of attitudes toward failure on self-control
changes as adults enter into old adulthood. The last presentation of the symposium brings
some good news: data from South Korea shows in fact that social cognition skills do not
necessarily decrease among the elderly, but rather change, and it is such a change that needs
to be understood to provide better care to the aging population.