APLICACIÓN A ESTRUCTURAS DE FIBRA DE VIDRIO

As mentioned in the earlier sections, ToM is the ability to attribute mental states to self and others and to understand how these mental states are linked to our everyday behaviours. It is reasonable to think that this ability would vary among individuals like any other cognitive ability. The research investigating ToM in children has explored many social factors (such as parent-child interactions, number of siblings etc.) that can possibly be linked to ToM development. The following section explores these sources of variability in children’s understanding of their own and other’s minds.

Parent-child interactions: It has been suggested that individual differences

in ToM ability among children can be linked to familial factors such as family size, parenting strategies and language used in every day conversations (Brown et al.1996; Ruffman et al.1999). The research on parenting styles’ relation to ToM has indicated that parenting styles associated with negative control strategies (criticism, yelling, spanking etc.) and low levels of warmth and responsiveness have a negative effect on ToM development in young children. On the contrary, parenting styles characterized by high levels of warmth and responsiveness and positive control strategies (such as using rewards to control behaviours and

providing explanations for rules) have been associated with more advanced ToM in children (Hughes, et al. 1999; Pears and Moses 2003). An investigation of

parenting styles and ToM among Anglo-Australian children (aged 5–12) indicated that children’s mental state understanding had a negative relation with

authoritarian parenting (characterized by high levels of demanding and low levels of responsiveness) and a positive relation with authoritative parenting styles (associated with less punitive strategies for control combined with high levels of warmth).

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It has also been argued that the more the children are exposed to mental state words in everyday conversations the sooner they develop an understanding of mind (Garner et al. 1997; Turnbull and Carpendale 1999; Ruffman et al. 2002; Adrian et al. 2007). For instance, parental mental state discourse during joint reading activity with the child, was related to false belief understanding of the child (Symons et al. 2005). Similarly, children whose mothers explained the causes and consequences of emotions performed better on emotional understanding tasks than children of mothers who made fewer references to emotions (Garner et al. 1997). In a longitudinal study Ruffman et al. (2002) found that mother’s use of mental state words at an earlier time point was correlated with later mental state understanding in children even after controlling for a number of potential

mediators. Furthermore, it has been reported that mental state utterances of mothers predicted mental state understanding of children at a later age (Ruffman et al. 2006; Taumoepeau and Ruffman 2006; Taumoepeau and Ruffman 2008).

Furthermore, ToM has also been linked to maternal education (Pears and Moses 2003). It has been argued that maternal education can impact ToM by its association with general cognitive development of the child. Educated mothers have also been shown to offer more causal explanations for the social

phenomenon than the uneducated mothers; which can directly influence the child’s mental state understanding (Pears and Moses 2003). However most of the

research relating parental factors to child’s mental state understanding is carried out in Western cultures. It is uncertain if the interaction of parental variables with children’s ToM ability would remain similar in cultures that differ from the Western society.

Siblings: Another factor that has been identified to influence ToM ability within the family is the number of siblings a child has. Initially Perner, Ruffman and Leekam (1994) found that children with at least two siblings performed better on ToM tasks when compared with children who had no siblings. Subsequent studies confirmed that the association between ToM understanding and number of siblings persisted even after controlling for other variables such as language ability (Jenkins and Astington 1996; Ruffman et al. 1998). An interesting finding that emerged from these studies was that children who had older siblings benefitted more than the firstborns (Ruffman

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et al. 1998). It has been suggested that the younger children engage in interactions with a skilled partner (their older sibling) in play and have opportunities to witness their older siblings interact with others, which might help advance their ToM skills (Hughes and Leekam 2004). The firstborns on the other hand did not have these opportunities to polish their skills. Similarly, ‘only-children’ have been found to be at a disadvantage for understanding of mental states (Lewis et al. 1996). However, when the families that were large because of other live-in kin (such as aunts, uncles, cousins) were

compared with those that had a larger number of siblings, factors such as child’s age, availability and interaction with adults also appeared to be significant correlates of ToM (Lewis et al. 1996). Based on these findings Lewis et al. (1996) suggested that ToM is not simply transferred from one sibling to another; rather the young children benefit more from interaction with a variety of knowledgeable members of all ages in their household.

Furthermore, the association of mental understanding in young children with number of siblings also varies with the chronological age of the siblings. In a study of 3-5 year-olds, Peterson (2000) found that the children whose siblings were either an infant, a teenager or an adult, performed no better than children without siblings did. However, children who had sibling within the age range of 1-12 years scored

significantly higher on FB tasks. This could perhaps be due to the fact that the teenage and adult siblings’ mode of interaction with a preschooler does not differ much from the parents and lacks the elements that interactions with another child would have. Similarly, infant siblings do not provide any stimulation for understanding mental states. In a study that compared 3-5 year old twins, children with non-twin siblings and only-children, revealed that the ToM ability of children with non-twin sibling was more advanced than both only-children and twins with no other siblings (Cassidy et al. 2005). In addition, twins with other siblings outperformed twins without any siblings. The findings also revealed that children with at least 1 opposite-sex sibling performed better than children with only same-sex siblings. The authors suggested that it is not just the presence of another child that accounts for ToM benefit, rather it is the

diversity of perspectives in sibling interactions that allows the child to advance his/her ToM reasoning (Cassidy et al. 2005).

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Culture: As mentioned above, the ability to read others’ mental states is

associated with family size and the quality of interactions with parents and siblings. These factors vary in different cultures and therefore, it is reasonable to think that these and other cultural differences could influence the mental state understanding of young children. So far the research on mental state understanding has been predominately limited to Western American and European cultures (Wellman 2012; Wellman et al. 2001). In recent years, however, researchers have started to

investigate cultural differences in the acquisition of mental state understanding (Tardif and Wellman, 2000; Callaghan et al., 2005; Liu et al. 2008; Lecce and Hughes 2010). One of the earlier studies that investigated mental state

understanding across five cultures (Canada, India, Peru, Samoa and Thailand) revealed that children from all cultures passed false-belief tasks around 5 years of age (Callaghan et al. 2005). The findings of this cross-cultural study suggested a strong influence of biological maturational processes rather than cultural variations on ToM development. Later studies, however, found variations in the time and sequence of ToM acquisition in different cultures. For instance, a meta-analysis revealed that the children from Canada and Australia outperformed their

counterparts from the US and the UK on false-belief understanding (Wellman et al. 2001). In addition children from US and UK performed better than children from Austria and Japan (Wellman et al. 2001). Likewise, another study reported a delay of up to two years in ToM acquisition in Chinese children, when compared with their counterparts from North America (Liu et al. 2008).

In an attempt to explain cultural variations in mental state understanding researchers have referred to general distinctions between collectivist and individualist cultures (Wellman and Liu 2004; Mayer and Trauble 2013). It has been suggested that mental state understanding is influenced by cultural norms and attitudes (Ames et al. 2001). In general, the individualist cultures promote independence and autonomy, whereas the collectivist cultures value conformity and obedience resulting in interdependence (Greenfield and Suzuki 1998). Such differences in the desired outcomes of development could possibly account for the

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variation in ToM understanding in different cultures (Mayer and Trauble 2013). Such an explanation however, fails to cater for the differences within similar cultures. Variations in mental state understanding have also been reported within collectivist cultures such as Mainland China and Hong Kong, as well as within individualist cultures such as Britain and Italy (Liu et al. 2008; Lecce and Hughes 2010). Explanations based on more specific cultural differences (such as

conversational style or children’s pedagogical experiences) have been proposed to cater for the differences in ToM understanding in similar cultures (Lecce and

Hughes 2010; Hughes et al. 2014). However, further exploration is needed to determine the factors accountable for cultural variations in mental state understanding.