Are Emotion and Mind Understanding Differently Linked to Young Children's Social Adjustment? Relationships Between Behavioral Consequences of Emotions, False Belief, and SCBE

According to empirical findings, emotional knowledge and false belief understanding seem to be differently linked to social adjustment. However, whereas false belief is assessed through the capacity to identify its behavioral consequences, emotion tasks usually rely on the comprehension of facial expressions and of the situational causes of emotions. The authors examined if the documented relationship between social adjustment and emotion knowledge in children extends to the understanding of behavioral consequences of emotions. Eighty French-speaking preschoolers undertook false belief and consequence-of-emotion tasks. Their social adjustment was measured by the Social Competence and Behavior Evaluation. Children's language ability, their parent's level of education, and the familial socioeconomic score were taken into account. Results showed that children's social adjustment was significantly predicted by their knowledge of emotion, but not by their understanding of false belief. The findings confirm the special status of emotion among mental states for social adaptation and specify which dimensions of adaptation to peers and adults are predicted by the child's emotion understanding. They also suggest that the distinction between mind and emotion understanding may be conceptual rather than methodological.