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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Psychol.
Sec. Developmental Psychology
Volume 15 - 2024 | doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2024.1439824
This article is part of the Research Topic When (and how) Theory of Mind is useful? Evidence from Innovative Assessment Tools, Training, and Treatments Strategies - Volume II View all articles

Promoting theory of mind and emotion understanding in preschool settings: an exploratory training study

Provisionally accepted
Ilaria Grazzani Ilaria Grazzani *
  • University of Milano-Bicocca, Milan, Italy

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

    This new exploratory study is part of a larger ongoing follow-up project. Its specific aim was to verify whether an innovative European Program, primarily designed to enhance children's social and emotional learning, led to gains in theory of mind and emotion understanding when implemented in preschool settings. Thirty-four children (mean age: 56.4 months; SD: 10.1; range: 40-70 months) participated in the study. They were randomly and equally divided into a training group and a control group. The training sample completed eight linguistic-conversational activities drawn from the Program, in groups of 5 to 6 children, over eight weeks. The activities were based on listening to stories and/or watching videos and then thinking and talking about the inner world (thoughts and emotions) of the story characters as well as the participants' own inner states. During the training phase, the children in the control group engaged in drawing or free play activities. At both the pre-test and post-test phases of the study, all the children completed a language test, a battery of theory of mind (ToM) tasks (including 'change of location' and 'unexpected content' tasks), and the Test of Emotion Comprehension which evaluates nine components of emotion understanding (EU). The validated national versions of the tests were administered in all cases. Significant differences were identified between the training and control groups. Indeed, the participants in the Program training activities, which were based on conversational exchanges between an adult and a group of children, as well as among the children themselves, outperformed the control participants on both overall theory of mind and overall emotion understanding. A more detailed analysis showed that the training group outperformed the control group in relation to both specific components of EU and the 'change of location' ToM task. The results of this exploratory study suggest that the Program is effective at enhancing preschoolers' social understanding and thus merits implementation in preschool settings.

    Keywords: Theory of Mind, emotion understanding, social understanding, social and emotional learning, Training study, preschoolers

    Received: 29 May 2024; Accepted: 25 Jul 2024.

    Copyright: © 2024 Grazzani. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

    * Correspondence: Ilaria Grazzani, University of Milano-Bicocca, Milan, Italy

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