Correlates and antecedents of theory of mind development during middle childhood and adolescence: An integrated model

Abstract

Theory of Mind (ToM) is one of the core abilities that allows children to connect socially with others and to consider others’ perspectives. Historically, most research on ToM development has focused on early childhood, but recent years have seen an increased focus on how children build this critical social understanding beyond the preschool timeframe. Given this burgeoning literature, we have identified and organized findings across a variety of domains of development to provide a cohesive theoretical framework depicting the correlates and antecedents of ToM development throughout middle childhood and adolescence. Thus, the present paper provides a synthesis and narrative review of the research to yield insights into important ways in which often-disparate lines of study (e.g., brain specialization, relational aggression, reading comprehension) relate to ToM and bidirectionally influence one another in the developing child. Specifically, we focused our analysis of the literature on identifying neural networks underlying ToM, the roles of executive function and emotional self-regulation on ToM, the socioemotional correlates of ToM, and relations between ToM and academic performance. We also provide a brief discussion of studies recognizing sociocultural, linguistic, and contextual influences on ToM. Our review provides evidence for both common and distinct processes and corollaries with age across these disparate literatures, with significant research indicating the important role of mediating and moderating processes when considering how advanced ToM impacts development. We end by proposing a theoretical, integrative framework and discussing the future directions for the field, including testable predictions generated by the framework that span often-disparate domains of inquiry.