and Baumgartner, 1993; Symons, 2004; Kovalainen and Kumpulainen, 2005), thus we expected peer learning to be more effective in couples that were able to engage in interactions characterized by a higher quality of the dialogs.

# MATERIALS AND METHODS

fpsyg-07-01669 October 21, 2016 Time: 16:9 # 5

#### Participants

Sixty-four Italian children participated in the study (23 females and 41 males). Eight children were excluded from the study as they did not participate in either the individual storytelling or the joint story-telling task. The final sample included 56 participants. Participants were randomly selected from one predominantly middle-class primary school located on the outskirts of Florence. Four classes were involved (**Table 1**).

At the time of the study, no participant was diagnosed with a physical or mental disability, nor was included in a diagnostic process, or identified by the teachers as having special educational needs. Parents and school authorities, as well as the children themselves, gave consent to participate in the study. Regarding the Italian educational system, children start formal teaching of literacy at the age of six with entry to primary school and finish it when they conclude the last or fifth grade, at the age of 10 or 11.

## Procedure

Participants were asked to produce oral stories under two different experimental conditions: (a) a free story production by a single child; (b) a free story production by a couple: two children of the same gender constructed and told an invented story together. Joint-narrative partners were randomly assigned. The order of the two tasks was counter-balanced. Each story told by the children, as well as their dialogs were recorded and transcribed. For joint narratives, the dialogs and the story were separated and considered as distinct set of data. The researcher, in agreement with the teachers, at first, explained the storytelling tasks to the entire class so as to reassure the children and promote a climate of trust. Children were asked to make up a story without any book or visual materials or topic to guide them. As a consequence, children generated stories with a very different content. It is important to notice that individual and joint story-telling are daily school activities, since they are often used by teachers, making them an ecologically valid method to explore children's mental state talk. We included an example of

TABLE 1 | Description of the sample: total number, age, distribution of males and females, and mental state talk performance in individual and joint condition (mean and standard deviation).

narrative production of a couple of children from 1st grade (two individual narratives and one joint narrative) as Supplementary Table S1. After that, the activity continued in a room adjacent to the classroom both with the individual children and with the couples. First phase, a free story production was requested from the child (Task 1): "I would like you to tell me a story." Second phase, a free story production was requested from a couple of children (Task 2): "I want you and your partner to tell me a story invented by you together." In the joint condition, children could plan their performance how they preferred. Some first planned and agreed on the title and/or plot, others just start telling the story and interacted during the construction of the story. Each child, as well as the couples, stayed with the researcher from 15 to 30 min and every story was recorded. Overall, we collected 56 stories and 28 stories told by two children together. The data collection took place in agreement with the school and following the requirements of privacy and informed consent requested by Italian law (Legislative Decree DL-196/2003). Regarding the ethical standards for research, the study referred to the last version of the Declaration of Helsinki (World Medical Association, 2013). The present study was approved by the Ethical Committee of the Department of Psychology at the University of Florence, Italy.

# Coding Systems

Two independent judges coded the narratives in terms of narrative competence and mental state talk in individual and joint narratives, and quality of dialog in joint narratives. Interrater agreement scores were all acceptable (k > 0.70).

#### Mental State Talk

Mental state talk was analyzed by identifying terms and expressions referring to mental states (adapted from Bretherton and Beegley, 1982). In particular, we identified the following categories: perceptual-physiological states, emotional states, willingness states, cognitive states, and moral and socio-relational states (**Table 2**).

#### Narrative Competence

Children's narrative competence was assessed in terms of structure, cohesion, and coherence, using a coding scheme developed by Spinillo and Pinto (1994), and adapted by Pinto et al. (2015).

#### **Structure**

On the base of the presence, absence or/and combination of fundamental elements of a story (title, conventionalized story opening, characters, setting, problem, central event, resolution, and conventionalized story closing), children's productions were given an index score ranging from 0, "non-story," to 5, "complete story" (see Supplementary Material for details and examples on the narrative coding system, Supplementary Table S2).

#### **Cohesion**

Causal and temporal linguistic connectives were counted. Examples of causal connectives are: thus, because, therefore, it follows that, to this aim, as things stand, and the like (e.g., The fox wanted to eat the chicken. **To this aim**, the fox decided to hide).

TABLE 2 | Description of the coding system for mental state talk (adatpted from Bretherton and Beegley, 1982).

Examples of temporal connectives are: after, before that, at the beginning, suddenly, soon, and the like (e.g., Suddenly, the two boys heard a noise). Based on the number of connectives per total number of words, we assigned the narratives to four categories of cohesion: absent; low (the ratio of connectives/words was below the 33rd percentile); medium (the ratio of connectives/words was between the 33rd and 66th percentiles); and high (the ratio of connectives/words was above the 66th percentile). Absent was assigned a score of 0, low a score of 1, medium a score of 2, and high a score of 3.

#### **Coherence**

The number of incongruences were identified (sentences introduced by an adversative even though it did not contradict the previous sentence, such as: the monsters did not want to make peace, **but** the monsters wanted to attack). Based on the number of incoherencies per total number of propositions, we assigned the narratives to four categories of coherence: absent; low (the ratio of incoherencies/propositions was below the 33rd percentile); medium (the ratio of incoherencies/propositions was between the 33rd and 66th percentiles); and high (the ratio of incoherencies/propositions was above the 66th percentile). Absent was assigned a score of 0, low a score of 1, medium a score of 2, and high a score of 3.

#### Quality of dialogs

The quality of dialogs was analyzed in terms of discourse moves and communicative functions (Kovalainen and Kumpulainen, 2005).

#### **Discourse moves**

The analysis of discourse moves shows the participatory roles of each member in collective meaning making. The units of analysis are participants' utterances. We coded three types of discourse moves: children's initiation moves, that is utterances used to open a discourse on a particular topic; children's response moves, that is utterances that elaborated other initiations or responses; and children's follow-up moves, that is utterances that provided feedback on the ongoing interaction. This analysis allowed us to explore to what extent children engaged in dialogs, rather than producing solo-utterances, and what was the role of the experimenter.

#### **Communicative functions**

The analysis of communicative functions focalizes on the message unit and permits us to explore the nature of the interaction and its construction in ongoing interactions. The units of analysis are participants' utterances. We coded nine categories of communicative function (**Table 3**).

## Data Analysis

Mental state talk was divided by the fluency of the participants' productions: the total number of words used to tell the stories was counted to create ratios, standardize participants' performances, and check for the potentially confounding effect of narrative length. Ratios were also calculated for cohesion and coherence score, dividing raw scores by the total number of words. Following, mental state talk scores were transformed into percentiles. There are several ways to explore children's narrative competence, adopting both continuous data (Haden et al., 1997; Fivush et al., 2006), and categorical data (Bigozzi and Vettori, 2015; Pinto et al., 2015, 2016b). In this study, narrative competence variables (i.e., mental state talk, structure, cohesion, and coherence) were re-coded into a 3-point scale using the percentile distribution: the first point was for scores lower than the 33rd percentile, the second point for scores between the 33rd and the 66th percentile and, finally, the third point corresponded to scores higher than the 66th percentile. Each variable was recoded coherently with this positional criteria, both for individual and for joint narrative tasks.

To verify whether the joint condition systematically improved students' mental state talk when compared to their individual performances we identified incremental and decremental subjects. To this aim, we compared the individual and joint performances of each subject, and identified two groups: individuals who incremented their mental state talk from the individual to the joint condition (incremental), and individuals that decremented their mental state talk from the individual to the joint condition (decremental) (**Table 4**).

Since prior research showed that children's narrative competence develops throughout primary school (Bamberg,

#### TABLE 3 | Analysis of communicative functions.

fpsyg-07-01669 October 21, 2016 Time: 16:9 # 7

TABLE 4 | Frequencies of decremental and incremental individuals/couples (total scores and divided by grade).

1997), we verified the influence of children's narrative competence on the efficacy of peer interaction on mental state talk. To this aim, we compared performances in structure, cohesion, and coherence of incremental children versus decremental children. Then, we verified whether the joint condition is particularly effective for individuals for low levels of mental state talk. We tested the frequency of participants' distribution in the three groups through a binomial statistical test.

To verify the conditions under which joint narratives have a beneficial effect on children's mental state talk, we changed the unit of analysis from the individual to the couple, and proceeded to identify incremental and decremental couples. A couple was defined as incremental if the percentile score in the joint condition was higher than the scores obtained by the two participants of the couple in the individual condition. A couple was defined as decremental, if the percentile score in the joint condition was lower the scores obtained by the two participants of the couple in the individual condition (**Table 4**). We explored two conditions through a series of Mann–Whitney U tests: (i) whether the joint condition is particularly effective for couples made up of individuals with discrepant individual performances in mental state talk; and (ii) whether incremental couples were engaged in interactions of higher quality than decremental couples were. For all statistical analysis, the effect-size was estimated (Fritz et al., 2012).

# RESULTS

Descriptive statistics for mental state talk and narrative competence in the individual and joint condition are reported in **Table 5**. Descriptive statistics for quality of interaction in the joint condition are reported in **Table 6**.

In the individual condition, mental state talk did not correlate with any narrative competence score, namely structure (r = 0.14, p = 0.31), cohesion (r = −0.13, p = 0.34), or coherence (r = −0.02, p = 0.89). In the joint condition, mental state talk correlated with cohesion (r = 0.41, p = 0.04), but not with structure (r = 0.12, p = 0.56) or coherence (r = −0.06, p = 0.77). According to the Mann–Whitney test, the performances in structure (U = 359.50, z = −0.81, p = 0.94, η 2 = 0.00), cohesion (U = 300.00, z = −1.11, p = 0.27, η 2 = 0.07), and coherence (U = 267.50, z = −1.80, p = 0.07, η 2 = 0.18) of incremental and decremental children were statistically similar.

## Effects of Joint Narratives

The joint condition was not systematically beneficial for all students' mental state talk performances. The probability of using more mental state talk in the joint condition than in the individual one was not above chance (Binomial test, p = 0.89). On a descriptive level, we compared the differences from the individual to the joint performances of incremental versus decremental participants (**Figure 1**). In the joint condition, incremental children are able to increase their use of perceptual,

TABLE 5 | Descriptive statistics for mental state talk and narrative competence (ratios: mental state term/number of words): Mean (M), standard deviation (SD), median (Mdn), skewness (Skw), and kurtosis (Kur).

TABLE 6 | Descriptive statistics for quality of interaction (count of discourse moves and communicative functions): Mean, standard deviation, median, skewness, and kurtosis.

moral, and willingness terms, whereas emotional terms are substantially stable in the two conditions. Instead, incremental children also decrease their use of cognitive terms in the joint condition. Decremental individuals decrease the use of mental state talk in all categories from the individual to the joint condition, with cognitive terms displaying the higher percentage of change.

# Conditions of Efficacy of the Joint Condition

To explore the conditions under which joint narratives increase children's mental state talk, we changed our unit of analysis to couples (incremental and decremental). To illustrate the differences in incrementation and presence of mental state in the individual narrative across grades, in **Table 1** we report the means of the incremental couples' mental state talk ratios in the individual and joint condition, for the total sample as well as for each grade.

When analyses were conducted at the individual level, one statistical significant result emerged.

When analyses were conducted at the couple level, two statistical significant result emerged, both related to differences in quality of interaction. When we compared types of couples on the basis of discrepancy among individual performances in mental state talk of the two members of each couple, the Mann– Whitney U test did not report a statistically significant difference (**Table 7**). When we compared types of couples on the basis of quality of interaction (discourse moves, and communicative functions), the Mann–Whitney U test showed that incremental couples are characterized by more dialogs initiated by the teacher, and more utterances aimed at orchestrating the interaction than decremental couples are. Although not a significant result, the Mann–Whitney showed a tendency for students in incremental couples to speak more than students in decremental couples (**Table 7**).

# DISCUSSION

The aim of this study was to analyze whether a joint narrative condition influenced children's production on mental state talk. Mental state talk is a valid and reliable indicator of children's ToM (Dunn and Hughes, 1998; Astington and Baird, 2005; Symons et al., 2005; Antonietti et al., 2006), thus the results of this study can contribute to our understanding of the influence of interactional contexts and discursive practices in school on children's understanding of other people's thoughts, beliefs, feelings, and intentions. School peer-interaction practices have a demonstrated positive effect on several aspects of the child's psychology (e.g., academic performances, O'Donnell and King, 1999; cognitive development, Riese et al., 2012; and social skills, Ginsburg-Block et al., 2006), and we extended this effect to mental state talk. We were interested in the conditions under

TABLE 7 | Mean rank comparison between the two types of couples (incremental vs. decremental) in terms of mean discrepancy between individual performances of the two members of each couple and quality of interaction (discourse moves and communicative functions): sample sizes, mean ranks, Mann–Whitney U test (ZU), p-value and effect-size (η 2 ).

T, teacher; S, student.

which a peer-interaction context improves children's mental state talk.

Firstly, we controlled the effect of narrative competence. Narratives themselves are an important source of mental state talk (Dyer et al., 2000), thus children's production of mental states could be influenced by their capacity to represent the protagonist's intentions and subsequent actions (Pelletier and Beatty, 2015). Our resulted indicated that children's production

of mental state talk was unrelated to their competence in producing a narrative with a conventional structure, either in the individual or joint condition. Mental state talk appears to be an independent component of children's mind, which can be facilitated or hindered by contextual variables, such as a narrative task, but does not overlap with other skills involved by the task itself, such as narrative competence. In other words, children's mental state talk is activated by narratives, rather than being a by-product of narrative competence. Prior research showed that children's narrative competence develops throughout primary school (Bamberg, 1997). In this study, we controlled for this potentially confounding effect by comparing incremental and decremental children's performances in structure, cohesion and coherence. No significant difference emerged, suggesting that children's developing narrative competence did not play a significant role in supporting mental state talk. Narrative competence and ToM appear to be independent constructs.

The results of this study confirmed that peer interaction does not automatically lead to increased performances, as not necessarily are two students able to engage in a productive collaboration (Prangsma et al., 2007). Before turning our attention to the conditions under which peer interaction produces an increase in mental state talk, let us discuss changes in the patterns of mental state talk from the individual to the joint condition in incremental and decremental couples. In the joint condition, incremental couples increase their use of perceptual and physiological terms, willingness terms, and moral terms. In particular, incremental and decremental couples display the largest difference in the use of moral terms. Thus, peer interaction seems to act on the core component of a narrative. According to Linde (2010), it is the inclusion of a moral meaning that distinguishes a story from a list of events or a chronicle. Interestingly, moral components cannot be completely defined structurally, as confirmed by the lack of correlation between mental state talk and narrative competence, including the structural component. Linde (2010) also added that a narrative can be considered successful if there is an agreement on the moral meaning of a story. Generally, such an agreement should take place between the narrator and the interlocutor, whereas a joint narrative activity requires this agreement to be reached by the two narrators. In this sense, peer interaction might be a reflective tool on the moral aspects of a story and on its dialogical nature.

The other two main differences between incremental and decremental couples in terms of change across the two conditions concern perceptual-physiological terms and willingness terms. As suggested by previous studies Pelletier and Beatty (2015) children need high levels of mental state talk to create a narrative based on the characters intentions and the subsequent actions. Thus, peer interaction might stimulate children to share and negotiate the intentions of the characters of the joint narrative (i.e., willingness states) and the actions connected to such intentions (i.e., perceptual and physiological states). Feathers (2002) stated that if the characters' intentions are explicitly described in a narrative, then children are abler to identify each mental state present in the story, and peer interaction might contribute to this link.

Once confirmed that peer interaction does not automatically lead to higher performances in mental state talk, we proceeded to explore the conditions under which children increased their mental state talk from the individual to the joint condition. A first variable controlled in this study was children's individual levels of mental state talk. Prior studies have demonstrated in certain cases, children's ToM, as assessed by a standardized test, is more strictly related to their individual mental state talk, rather than to the mental state talk produced while interacting with a partner (i.e., older partner, Symons et al., 2005). According to our data, children included in the incremental couples had lower levels of mental state talk in individual narratives than children included in the decremental couples did. Thus the facilitating effect of a peer-interaction condition is confirmed for children who are at the moment of initial elaboration or emergence of mental state talk, in line with prior studies demonstrating the conditions under which group performance is superior to individual performance (Mugny et al., 1981).

A second variable explored in this study to explore the conditions under which peer interaction positively influences children's mental state talk was discrepancy between the individual mental state talk of the two members of a couple. According to our data, the individual levels of mental state talk of members of incremental couples were not more or less discrepant than the ones of decremental couples. This finding emphasizes that for peer learning to be effective, there is no need to create a couple with an asymmetrical relationship ("peer tutoring;" Duran and Monereo, 2005), a model advocated by Vygotsky, who claimed that problem-solving in interaction with more expert peers allows the child to enter new areas of potential (i.e., zone of proximal development), with both members of the couple benefitting from the interaction by internalizing all the processes enacted during the meaning-constructing discourse (Vygotsky, 1978).

Finally, we examined the interaction between partners in joint narratives in terms of source of interaction and communicative use of language. According to our data, incremental couples interacted more than decremental couples did, as shown by a higher number of interventions by the children. Also, children produced more utterances to orchestrate and regulate the dialog, which is probably the reason why children in the incremental couples interacted more and, in turn, benefitted more from the joint narrative condition. Peer-assisted learning contexts require high levels of intersubjectivity, which needs to be accomplished by mutual adjustments of the two partners (Ginsburg-Block et al., 2006; Tarchi and Pinto, 2015). None of the other comparisons was statistically significant. Students in incremental and decremental couples seemed to interact in a similar way: they mainly interacted to define and elaborate the topic of their narrative, exchanged information and confirmed that they agreed on their partner's story-lines.

# CONCLUSION

This study describes the effect of peer-interaction on mental state talk. Our results suggest that a peer interaction intervention

is mostly beneficial for children with lower levels of individual mental state talk. This is consistent with a traditional line of research on socio-cognitive conflict emphasizing how children progress as a function of interacting with others is significant when they are in the initial stages of the elaboration of the target process (Mugny et al., 1981). Moreover, interaction played an essential part in the effect of peer-learning. Children who improved their mental state talk in the joint condition have been able to create a high level of intersubjectivity with their partner, as demonstrated by the higher number of interventions to orchestrate the dialog. When focusing on the interaction, as well as the product, children were also able to achieve a mutual understanding of the activity by being exposed to each other's reasoning behind their own viewpoint (Kruger, 1993). This mechanism appeared to be more important than having students working with a more expert peer (peer tutoring, Duran and Monereo, 2005).

This finding provides useful information for educators: children's ToM can be improved through children's engagement in a peer-assisted learning task. Moreover, in agreement with Pelletier and Beatty (2015), we believe that this study also contributes to improving children's appreciation of narratives, which could be hindered by an impaired understanding of the story characters' mental states. Furthermore, our results emphasize the importance of the role played by the teacher. Incremental couples were characterized by more interventions by the adult, which scaffolded children's interactions and coconstruction of the story.

This study was affected by a few limitations. Firstly, our results are limited by the small sample size, which determines problems of statistical powers and risks of not finding existing associations between variables. Moreover, the size of our sample sizes did not allow to test the moderation effect of age on the association between peer interaction and mental state talk. Secondly, although several studies used and validated mental state talk as an implicit measure of ToM (e.g., Dunn and Hughes, 1998; Astington and Baird, 2005; Symons et al., 2005; Antonietti et al., 2006), results from this study would be sounder if an explicit evaluation of ToM with a specific test was included. Thirdly, past studies have shown that children's ToM and mental state

# REFERENCES

talk correlate with other variables, such as executive functions (Bianco et al., 2015). Future studies should include these variables and examine whether the results obtained in this study partially depend on their influence. Fourthly, generalization of results is limited by the research design of this study, in particular by the use of oral narratives. Prior studies have demonstrated the presence of a discontinuity in children's narrative competence, when writing is introduced (Pinto et al., 2015, 2016b). In primary school children are asked to write their narratives, rather than tell them, but we believe in the importance of keeping oral narratives in primary school too, given their fundamental role in eliciting and organizing children's ToM through the use of mental state talk (Guajardo and Watson, 2002; Pinto et al., 2016a). Finally, in this study children were allowed to create stories without specific directions. As a consequence, children's narratives resulted in a wide variety of contents. Prior studies emphasized the influence of the context and instructions on children's narrative production (e.g., Berman, 1995; Cameron and Hutchison, 2009), and future studies should verify whether also mental state talk depends on the instructions given and the content of the stories produced.

# AUTHOR CONTRIBUTIONS

All authors listed, have made substantial, direct and intellectual contribution to the work, and approved it for publication.

### ACKNOWLEDGMENT

We would like to thank Anna Tosi for her help with data collection.

## SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL

The Supplementary Material for this article can be found online at: http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fpsyg. 2016.01669

Vygotsky, L. S. (1978). Mind in Society. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

**Conflict of Interest Statement:** The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Copyright © 2016 Pinto, Tarchi and Bigozzi. 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.

# The Relationship between Emotion Comprehension and Internalizing and Externalizing Behavior in 7- to 10-Year-Old Children

#### Ariane Göbel1 \*, Anne Henning2 , Corina Möller3 and Gisa Aschersleben3

1 Clinic for Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and Psychotherapy, University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf, Hamburg, Germany, 2 Early Intervention Institute, SRH College of Health, Gera, Germany, 3 Department of Psychology, Developmental Psychology Unit, Saarland University, Saarbrücken, Germany

The influence of internalizing and externalizing problems on children's understanding of others' emotions has mainly been investigated on basic levels of emotion comprehension. So far, studies assessing more sophisticated levels of emotion comprehension reported deficits in the ability to understand others' emotions in children with severe internalizing or externalizing symptoms. The aim of this study was to investigate the relation between emotion comprehension and interindividual differences, with a focus on internalizing and externalizing behavior in children aged 7–10 years from the general population. A sample of 135 children was tested for emotion understanding using the Test of Emotion Comprehension. Information on internalizing and externalizing behavior was assessed with the Child Behavior Checklist 4/18. Age, bilingual upbringing, and amount of paternal working hours were significant control variables for emotion comprehension. In contrast to prior research, overall level of emotion understanding was not related to externalizing symptoms and correlated positively with elevated levels of somatic complaints and anxious/depressed symptoms. In addition, and in line with previous work, higher levels of social withdrawal were associated with worse performance in understanding emotions elicited by reminders. The present results implicate not only an altered understanding of emotions among more specific internalizing symptoms, but also that these alterations occur already on a low symptom level in a community based sample.

Keywords: emotion comprehension, emotion understanding, behavioral problems, internalizing, externalizing, child behavior checklist

# INTRODUCTION

Emotion comprehension is defined as the knowledge to identify and understand others' emotions by facial or bodily cues, and within specific social contexts (Harris et al., 2016). Emotion comprehension develops up until early adolescence along with increasing abilities in perspective taking and understanding of social and moral norms, and can therefore be described as the affective side of social cognition (Wellman, 2014).

Pons et al. (2004) identified at least nine successive components of emotion comprehension, which children master until the age of 11 years and which can be assessed via the Test of Emotion

Edited by:

Ilaria Grazzani, University of Milano-Bicocca, Italy

#### Reviewed by:

Tilmann Habermas, Goethe Business School, Germany Alessandro Pepe, University of Milano-Bicocca, Italy

> \*Correspondence: Ariane Göbel<EMAIL_ADDRESS>
#### Specialty section:

This article was submitted to Developmental Psychology, a section of the journal Frontiers in Psychology

Received: 29 August 2016 Accepted: 22 November 2016 Published: 06 December 2016

#### Citation:

Göbel A, Henning A, Möller C and Aschersleben G (2016) The Relationship between Emotion Comprehension and Internalizing and Externalizing Behavior in 7 to 10-Year-Old Children. Front. Psychol. 7:1917. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2016.01917

Comprehension (TEC, Pons et al., 2004). The proposed components can be categorized into three developmental phases: First, in the external phase, children between 3 and 5 years are able to recognize and label facial expressions of basic emotions (e.g., Bullock and Russell, 1985), infer a person's emotion based on situational cues (e.g., Cutting and Dunn, 1999), and understand that an external reminder may reactivate a past emotional state (e.g., Lagattuta et al., 1997). By the age of 7 years, children master the mental phase characterized by the improved ability of perspective taking. Within this phase, children understand that two persons can experience different emotions regarding an object depending on how strong their desire to receive the object is (e.g., Harris et al., 1987). Further, children understand that the same situation can elicit different emotions in two persons depending on their belief about the context of the situation (e.g., being aware of danger or not; Pons et al., 2004). At the same age, they know that a person's outward emotional expression and internal emotional experience can deviate from each other (Wellman and Liu, 2004). Finally, by around 9 years, children take different, divergent perspectives on the same scenario into account and by doing so, learn to understand the components of the reflective phase. They understand that incorporating different perspectives on a given situation may result in conflicting, mixed emotions in the same person, that a transgression of moral rules to satisfy a desire leads to negative emotions (e.g., Lagattuta, 2005), and moreover that cognitive strategies can effectively regulate emotions (e.g., Stegge and Terwogt, 2007).

Although it was shown that despite of small variations on component level, the development of emotion understanding from a rather external to a deeper, more complex understanding is similar among western and non-western cultures (Janke, 2008; Roazzi et al., 2009; Molina et al., 2014), some studies report evidence that interindividual differences influence the ontogenesis of emotion comprehension. Especially the child's receptive (understanding and comprehension of spoken or written words/sentences) and expressive (production of spoken or written words/sentences) language abilities are related to emotion comprehension throughout childhood (e.g., Cutting and Dunn, 1999; Pons et al., 2003; Beck et al., 2012). Moreover, cross-sectional and longitudinal studies indicate that not general language abilities only, but also the amount of communication of mental and emotional states with parents and older siblings influences children's current and later emotion understanding (Brown and Dunn, 1992; Cutting and Dunn, 1999). In accordance with these findings, training studies confirm the positive effect of explicit emotion state talk on emotion comprehension (e.g., Pons et al., 2003; Gavazzi and Ornaghi, 2011). Additionally, factors like the socioeconomic status, the quality of attachment between family members, or non-verbal intelligence scores have been identified as positive predictors of emotion comprehension (Meins and Fernyhough, 1999; Albanese et al., 2010; Colle and Del Giudice, 2011).

Besides the aforementioned factors, children's behavioral problems in form of internalizing and externalizing symptoms have been identified to be associated not only with social adjustment but also with their ability to understand others' emotions. Among children and adolescents, internalizing and externalizing problems are the most common mental health problems with prevalence rates of ∼10 and 14%, respectively (Ihle and Esser, 2002; Hölling et al., 2007). Internalizing problems are characterized by anxious and depressive symptoms, social withdrawal and somatic complaints. Externalizing problems on the other hand are defined as aggressive, oppositional, and delinquent behavior. Long-term consequences are problems within social, school and later professional environment (Ihle et al., 2000). Over the course of development, gender differences for the prevalence rate of emotional problems and behavior problems occur: While boys show higher rates of internalizing symptoms during childhood, an increase in internalizing symptoms is reported for teenage girls and young women with greater long-term stability (Ihle et al., 2000; Hölling et al., 2007). Externalizing symptoms are in general more common among boys, have an earlier onset in childhood, and show higher persistence rates with more unfavorable courses (Plück et al., 2000).

Longitudinal studies investigating the relation between behavioral problems and emotion understanding in samples from the general population report that pre-schoolers' ability to recognize others' facial expression negatively predicted the level of externalizing symptoms during pre-school years (Denham et al., 2002). Further, the comprehension of facial emotional expression and emotion situation knowledge of socially disadvantaged first-graders predicted their level of selfreported internalizing symptoms 4 years later (Izard, 2001; Fine et al., 2003). In a recent meta-analysis, Trentacosta and Fine (2010) investigated the comprehension of discrete emotions, which can directly be identified via facial expression, gesture, vocalization, or social context. The authors report robust low to medium negative effect sizes for internalizing and externalizing symptoms present in both community and clinical samples. Considering the age subgroups separately, effect sizes varied as a function of age –with small negative effect sizes for 3- to 5 year-olds, and medium negative effect sizes for 9- to 15-year-olds. However, for 6- to 11-year-old children, no significant effects of internalizing or externalizing symptoms were found.

Noteworthy, the few studies comprising the oldest age group mostly assessed emotion knowledge in samples of children with clinically relevant behavioral problems. Overall, the above-mentioned results support the assumption that children with internalizing and externalizing behavior in both clinically diagnosed and community samples have difficulties in understanding discrete emotions.

However, only a few studies have investigated this relation testing more complex aspects of emotion comprehension (Southam-Gerow and Kendall, 2000). Regarding internalizing symptoms, most evidence for a relationship with higher levels of emotion comprehension derives from studies investigating clinically referred children with depression and anxiety disorders. Researchers focusing on individual components of emotion comprehension report that children diagnosed with depression or anxiety disorders show a significant worse understanding of situations eliciting mixed emotions (Meerum Terwogt, 1990) and less knowledge of strategies to regulate or hide emotions

(Southam-Gerow and Kendall, 2000). In a study testing the performance in all TEC components in a sample of clinically anxious 8- to 12-year olds, no association between emotion comprehension and the general level of anxiety symptoms could be found, but between more specific forms of anxiety in obsessive-compulsive and post-traumatic stress disorder and emotion comprehension (Bender et al., 2015). To our knowledge, no study so far investigated the association between all nine TEC components and internalizing behavior in a sample from the general population.

Regarding the understanding of higher levels of emotions in children with externalizing behavior, studies are rare and report mixed results. Sutton et al. (1999) report that 7- to 10-yearold children, who were identified by their teachers as ringleader bullies (defined as verbally or physically attacking others) actually showed a better understanding in social cognition tasks including emotion comprehension compared to their classmates. Belacchi and Farina (2010) were first to test the correlation between the TEC and teacher-rated social role in a pre-school aged sample and confirmed a better emotion understanding in children being categorized as bullies, their reinforcers or assistants for the first component of emotion comprehension (facial recognition) only. No relations were found for the remaining components, or the total TEC score. On the contrary, children being categorized as members of prosocial groups showed positive associations with the understanding of affective expressions and emotions elicited by situational cues or desires. However, these studies focus on teachers' reports of students' social roles in the school environment, which might not validly reflect externalizing behavior in general. Therefore, research on the relation of higher levels of emotion comprehension and symptoms of behavioral problems is needed.

A model to explain the association between deficits in emotion comprehension and behavioral problems is the Social Information Processing Model (SIP) by Crick and Dodge (1994). Originally developed to explain the association between an altered perception and processing of social information in children with externalizing behavior, the model was later adapted to children with internalizing symptoms (Luebbe et al., 2010). Within SIP, six steps are proposed to explain how information is processed, and how subsequent actions are planned and performed. First, stimuli from the social environment or own body signals (e.g., increased heartbeat) are encoded and in a second step interpreted based on the evaluation of possible intentions of the other person (e.g., to be nice or mean), own goals, motivations and the perception of own personality. In a third step, based on this evaluation, actual personal goals for this interaction are defined (e.g., wish to play with the other person or to leave the situation). Next, based on information from the long-term memory, possible actions are generated to reach this goal. The fifth step is to choose the reaction fitting best to the prior defined goals or outcome expectations, which is afterward performed in the sixth step. Part of this process is also to consider, how socially accepted the generated options of reactions are. For example, to punch someone might seem like the easiest way to end a conflict, but would most likely not be the most socially acceptable solution. Social responses following the reaction and its effectiveness are themselves processed, evaluated and stored in long-term memory. Early subjective experiences from the social environment form scripts and schemata on how social interactions are constructed and usually take place. These scripts and schemata are necessary to ensure fast, efficient and subconscious information processing, orientation and capacity to act in everyday life (e.g., Salzer Burks et al., 1999). The more often they are activated, the stronger they are anchored in the longterm memory, leading to an even faster and automated activation in the right context. Therefore, they can show high stability from child- to adulthood. Despite its efficiency, information processing based on automatically activated scripts and schemata leaves out non-compliant information and situational stimuli, subsequently leading to a bias in processing social situations, and consequently influences the development and stabilization of maladjusted behavior patterns. Maladjusted behavior on the other hand leads to negative experiences from the environment and might strengthen processing biases in a feedback loop (Crick and Dodge, 1994).

Several studies support this model. A meta-analysis of 36 studies investigating clinical and community samples found that children with disruptive and aggressive behavior showed a bias in the first steps of SIP during the processing of situational cues and stimuli (Yoon et al., 1999). The authors do not only report an attentional bias with neglecting relevant general situational cues, but also higher rates of encoding cues associated with hostility. Furthermore, children more often attributed negative intentions behind the behavior of others. Longitudinal studies investigating community samples report that an altered and biased information processing in preschoolers predicted both lower popularity among peers, and an increased amount of aggressive behavior in the same children when they were school-aged and teenagers (Dodge et al., 2003; Lansford et al., 2006). Studies applying the SIP paradigm to children with anxious and depressive symptoms also find a negative information processing style with higher rates of attributing ambiguous situations as negative, attributing negative intentions to others in social interactions and generating contraproductive behavior responses to solve a hypothetical situation (Daleiden and Vasey, 1997; Luebbe et al., 2010). Bell et al. (2009) found associations between negative attributional biases and symptoms of both anxiety and depression in a factor-analytic study assessing 8- to 13-year-old children recruited from public schools. Additionally, only depressive symptoms were negatively associated with positive SIP. The associations between SIP biases in perception and evaluation of information from social contexts might also explain the above reported associations between both externalizing and internalizing behavior and the comprehension of others' emotion.

Overall, the aforementioned studies indicate a lower understanding of others' emotions in children showing both internalizing and externalizing symptoms. However, impairments in emotion comprehension cannot easily be traced back to behavioral problems in general. Most studies investigating this association focus on the comprehension of discrete emotion in pre-school-aged children. Little is known about the relation of more sophisticated aspects of emotion

comprehension and internalizing and externalizing behavior in children beyond the pre-school years from the general population. Therefore, the aim of the present study was to investigate the nine components of emotion comprehension in normally developing, school-aged children (7–10 years of age) and interindividual differences in emotion comprehension related to internalizing and externalizing behavior. In accordance with prior research, we expected to find an age effect for emotion comprehension, with older children outperforming younger ones.

In line with the above mentioned results from both community and clinical samples, and based on the assumption of an altered information processing in maladjusted children, we expected internalizing and externalizing behavior to negatively correlate with emotion comprehension and to independently explain unique variance of emotion understanding.

## MATERIALS AND METHODS

### Participants

The final sample comprised N = 135 children (72 female), with 34 7-year-olds (age in months M = 90.5, SD = 3.19, 17 female), 33 8-year-olds (M = 100.64, SD = 3.56, 19 female), 34 9-year-olds (M = 113.85, SD = 3.8, 18 female), and 34 10 year-olds (M = 124.62, SD = 3.7, 18 female). Of these, 12% were raised bilingually, 42.2% had one sibling and 34.8% two or more siblings. Regarding parental educational background, 69.7% of the fathers and 58.2% of the mothers had a high school or university degree. Further, 14.8% of the mothers and 3.7% of the fathers were unemployed, 66.7% of mothers and 9.6% of fathers were working half-time, and 18.5% of the mothers and 86.7% of the fathers were working full-time. All participants lived in Saarbrücken or its adjacent municipalities. The sample was recruited during open house events at Saarland University, Germany, by handing out flyers at schools, and by contacting interested families who had already participated in other studies of the department. Additional 12 children were tested but excluded due to developmental disorders (n = 2) and chronic diseases (n = 2) possibly influencing their performance, or to insufficient data provided by the parents (n = 8). The experiment was approved by the Ethical Committee of the Faculty for Social and Applied Human Sciences at Saarland University (running number of ethical approval EK16-10).

#### Measures

#### Socio-Demographic Questionnaire

Parents were asked to answer questions about their maternal and paternal education level as indices of their socioeconomic status (no degree = 0; general school certificate = 1, secondary school certificate = 2, advanced technical college certificate = 3, vocational technical diploma = 4, high school diploma = 5, university degree = 6), marital status (married/cohabiting = 0 and separated/single-parent household = 1) and number of siblings and friends. Maternal and paternal working hours (unemployed = 0, half-time employment = 1, and full-time employment = 2) were assessed as indices of their potential time spent with the family. Since Saarbrücken is located within the German-French border region, child's mother tongue (German = 0; other = 1) and bilingual upbringing (monolingual = 0, bilingual = 1) were also assessed. Further, the child's medical history regarding chronic diseases or developmental disorders was assessed as exclusion criteria.

#### Child Behavior Checklist 4/18

The degree of internalizing and externalizing symptoms was assessed with the German version of the Child Behavior Checklist (CBCL 4/18, Döpfner et al., 1994a). The CBCL 4/18 is a widely used parent report questionnaire assessing their child's social competence and problematic behavior within the last 6 months. This screening tool was developed as part of the empirically based dimensional classification system by Achenbach and Rescorla (2001). Within the dimensional approach, mental health problems are understood as characteristics along continuous dimensions of psychologic functioning, differing from normal development due to the intensity of reported symptoms. One hundred and eighteen problem items form in total eight syndrome scales, which can be combined to second order, broad scales. The for this study relevant broad scale Internalizing Problems is formed by the sum score of the three syndrome scales Withdrawn, Somatic Complaints, and Anxious/Depressed. Further, the broad scale Externalizing Problems is formed by the two syndrome scales Rule-Breaking Behavior and Aggressive Behavior. Each syndrome scale consists of those items, which loaded in factor and principal component analyses together on one factor and therefore form a syndrome cluster on the specific scale. Answers to each item are coded on a 3-point Likert- scale with 0 = not true, 1 = somewhat or sometimes true, 2 = very true or often true. Final T-values for broad scales and syndrome scales are calculated sensitive to gender. The T-values of the CBCL broad scales differ from those of the syndrome scales. For the broad scales Internalizing Problems and Externalizing Problems, a score from 60 to 62 marks behavior problems on a subclinical, a score of 64 or higher on a clinically relevant level. On syndrome scale level, a T-value between 67 and 70 marks behavior problems on a subclinical, a score of 71 or higher on a clinical level.

For the German translation, Cronbach's alpha of the syndrome scales and broad scales ranges between α = 0.56 and α = 0.91. Further, confirmed convergent and discriminant validity of the German version was previously reported (Döpfner et al., 1994b; Schmeck et al., 2001). In this study, Cronbach's alpha of the broad scale Internalizing Problems was α = 0.82 and ranged between α = 0.36 and 0.79 in the syndrome subscales. Regarding the Externalizing Problems scale Cronbach's Alpha was α = 0.88. Cronbach's Alpha for the subscales Rule-Breaking Behavior and Aggressive Behavior were α = 0.39 and α = 0.88, respectively.

#### Intelligence and Development Scales 5–10

To control for the level of language comprehension, a test taken from the Intelligence and Development Scales 5–10 (IDS 5–10, Grob et al., 2009) was conducted to assess receptive language comprehension. The IDS 5–10 is a test battery to assess cognitive development, language comprehension, mathematics, achievement motivation, psychomotor, and socio-emotional

development. In the test for receptive language comprehension, the examiner first shows different toys to the child, introducing them one after the other with a specific name (e.g., girl, boy, dog, cat) and puts them on the table in front of the child. Afterward the examiner reads aloud a behavior description of one or more characters, which the child is asked to reenact using the specific toys. The tests consists of 12 successive sentences, with increasing difficulty due to higher complexity of the behavior sequences. Scoring ranges between 0 (wrong reenactment), 0.5 (right reenactment but order of sequences is wrong), and 1 (right reenactment, right order of sequences). To compare the different age groups, T-values are calculated for each age group individually. Reliability of the receptive language subtest is satisfactory with a Cronbach's Alpha of α = 0.88 and a test-retest reliability of rtt = 0.57. Construct and criterion validity are also reported (see also Grob et al., 2009 for more details). For this study, the Cronbach's Alpha values were α = 0.57 and by this below those reported by the Grob et al. (2009).

#### Test of Emotion Comprehension (TEC)

The TEC (Pons and Harris, 2000) was developed to test nine components of emotion understanding, namely (I) recognition of facial expression, (II) external causes of emotions, (III) desire-based emotions, (IV) belief-based emotions, (V) the influence of a reminder on present emotional states, (VI) regulation of emotional states, (VII) hiding emotional states, (VIII) having mixed emotions, and (IX) emotions caused by moral considerations. In this study, the German version of the TEC was used (Janke, 2008). The test material consist of a picture book with simple drawings. The examiner presents nine short stories to the child, each accompanied by at least one drawing. Below the drawing for each vignette, its protagonist is portrayed with four out of five possible different emotion outcomes ("happy," "sad," "angry," "scared," or "just alright"). Depending on participants' own gender, a corresponding version of the picture book with either female or male protagonists was presented. At the end of each story, the child is asked to point on the most appropriate emotion outcome. For each component, a score of 1 is assigned if answered correctly. The overall score of emotion understanding ranges from 0 to 9. Since research by Janke (2008) with a German sample and Albanese et al. (2006) with an Italian sample showed that especially for components III and IV, children often chose the neutral instead of the expected positive emotion outcome, scoring was adjusted accordingly. Therefore, in addition to the original scoring by Pons et al. (2004), choosing the neutral emotion outcome for the components III and IV was accepted as a correct answer. The British version of the TEC showed in a sample of 9-year-olds good test-retest reliability after 3 months with r(18) = 0.84 (Pons et al., 2002). In another study with a sample of 7-to-11-year-olds, test-retest reliability after 13 months controlled for age and gender was r(40) = 0.68 (Tenenbaum et al., 2004). Its validity was also positively evaluated (see Pons et al., 2004).

#### Statistical Analysis

Cases were excluded from further analyses, if information on sociodemographic variables (n = 6) was missing. Additionally, in line with the manual guidelines, CBCL scores were not calculated when answers on more than eight items were missing (Döpfner et al., 1994a). Further, if more than 20% of items were missing for a specific scale, this scale was excluded from analyses (n = 2). Answers missing completely at random were replaced by the average of the other items for this scale (Schafer and Graham, 2002). Since there was only one child being raised with another mother tongue, this variable was excluded from further analyses.

Inspection of means, standard deviations, skewness, and kurtosis of the assessed variables revealed that both the CBCL broad and syndrome scales had right-skewed distributions. Therefore, their T-values were log-transformed for further analyses. In order to assess differences in emotion comprehension for gender and the four age groups, a 2 (gender) × 4 (age: 7, 8, 9, and 10 years) ANOVA was performed with the total TEC score as the dependent variable. Prior to conducting the ANOVA, the data were checked for homogeneity of variance and independence of observed variables. Additionally, a Kruskal–Wallis-test was conducted to test for significant age differences on the individual components of the TEC. To test for associations between the TEC total score and potential control variables (IDS score, maternal/paternal educational background, maternal/paternal working hours, bilingual upbringing, number of siblings, number of friends, marital status), bivariate Pearson and Spearman correlations were performed. Since for each variable a specific direction of relation was expected based on the literature, significance of the correlations were tested one-tailed.

To test the hypotheses of negative relations between emotion comprehension and internalizing or externalizing symptoms, Spearman correlations (one-tailed) were conducted. Following this, backward regression analyses were performed to investigate the amount of variance in emotion comprehension explained by each predictor. Finally, the associations between the CBCL broad and syndrome scales and each TEC component using Pearson bivariate correlations (two-tailed) were explored. All statistical analyses were conducted using IBM SPSS R 22 and the statistical level for significance was set at α = 0.05.

#### RESULTS

#### Test of Emotion Comprehension

For the total sample, the TEC score ranged from 3 to 9, (M = 7.21, SD = 1.8, n = 135). A 2(gender) × 4 (age group) ANOVA revealed a significant main effect of age on the total TEC score, F3,127 = 6.95, p < 0.001; ηp 2 = 0.14. Moreover, neither a significant main effect for gender (F1,127 = 0.862, p = 0.36, ηp 2 = 0.007), nor a significant interaction between age and gender (F3,127 = 6.95, p = 0.574, ηp 2 = 0.015) were revealed. Post hoc contrast analyses using Tukey- HSD controlling for Type 1 error revealed that 7-year-olds (M = 6.56; SD = 1.44) had significantly lower TEC scores than 9-year-olds (M = 7.38; SD = 1.02; p < 0.05) and 10-year-olds (M = 7.85; SD = 0.989; p < 0.01). In addition, the 8-year-olds showed significant lower TEC scores than the 10-year-olds (p < 0.05). The 9-year-olds did not significantly differ from the 8-year-olds (M = 7.03; SD = 1.29; p ≥ 0.629) or 10-year-olds (p ≥ 0.375). Further, while component

I (recognition) and component II (external cause) had a correct response rate of 100% for the whole sample, a Kruskal–Wallistest revealed significant age differences in the expected direction for the components IV (belief- based emotion), V (reminder), VII (hiding emotions), and VIII (mixed emotions, see **Table 1**).

Regarding the assessed control variables, analyses revealed significant correlations between the total TEC score and Paternal working hours (rs = −0.235, p < 0.01), and total TEC score and bilingual upbringing (r = 0.154, p < 0.05) only. Children of fathers with less working hours or no employment and those being raised with a second language scored higher on the total TEC score. For the variables IDS score, maternal educational background, paternal educational background, maternal working hours, number of siblings, number of friends, or marital status no significant correlations were found (all p-values ≥ 0.111).

#### Internalizing and Externalizing Behavior

An independent t-test revealed a significant gender difference for the Externalizing Problems scale, with girls (M = 49.2, SD = 8.82) having a significantly lower score than boys (M = 55.3, SD = 9.59, t(133) = −3.6, p < 0.001, d = 0.66). For Internalizing Problems, the difference of mean scores between girls (M = 52.0, SD = 9.13) and boys (M = 54.9, SD = 8.88) was not significant (t(133) = −1.77, p ≥ 0.08, d = 0.32).

Regarding the broad CBCL scale Internalizing Problems (total M = 53.4, SD = 9.10), 13.3% of the sample reached a score of 64 or higher, which indicates behavioral problems on a clinically relevant level. Regarding the broad scale Externalizing Problems (total M = 52.1, SD = 9.65), 10.6% of the total sample reached a score of 64 or higher. These rates of behavioral problems are overall comparable to prevalence rates reported for German community samples (Ihle et al., 2000; Hölling et al., 2007). When considering clinically relevant scores of T ≥ 70 on the individual syndrome scales, 3.7% of the sample reached this score on the Withdrawn syndrome scale (total M = 55.4, SD = 6.86), 2.5% on the Somatic Complaints syndrome scale (total M = 54.1, SD = 5.82), 2.5% on the Anxious/Depressed syndrome scale (total M = 56.1, SD = 7.37), 5.2% on the Rule-Breaking Behavior syndrome scale (total M = 54.3, SD = 5.72), and 3% on the Aggressive Behavior syndrome scale (total M = 55.1, SD = 8.40).

# Relationship between Emotion Comprehension and Behavioral Symptoms

Pearson bivariate correlations (one-tailed) revealed significant positive correlations between the total TEC score and the syndrome scales Somatic Complaints (M = 54.0, SD = 5.84; r = 0.156, p < 0.05) and Anxious/Depressed (M = 56.0, SD = 7.3; r = 0.191, p < 0.05). None of the other syndrome or broader scales were significantly correlated to the TEC total score (all rs < 0.114, all ps ≥ 0.094).

To further investigate the amount of explained variance in the TEC score by the two syndrome scales Somatic Complaints and Anxious/Depressed and the relevant control variables age, bilingual upbringing and paternal working hours, backward regression analyses were performed. The ordinal variable paternal working hours was dummy coded before entering it into the regression model. Since the majority of fathers worked fulltime (n = 117), the category full-time employment was used as reference group. Therefore, two dummy variables were calculated for the categories part-time employment and unemployment. Since the scales Somatic Complaints and Anxious/Depressed were not independent from another (r = 0.268, p < 0.001), individual regression analyses were performed for both scales (see **Table 2**). The final model including Somatic Complaints explained 21.6% of variance in total TEC score, with age explaining 12.8% and bilingual upbringing 5%. Unemployment explained 3.49% and part-time employment 2.31%. Finally, Somatic Complaints independently explained 2.37% of variance.

The same regression analysis was conducted including the Anxious/Depressed scale. This model explained 23.1% of variance. The explained variance of the control variables was comparable to the first model, with age explaining 13.1%, bilingual upbringing 4.97%, unemployment 3.65%, and part-time employment 2.13% of variance. Anxious/Depressed independently explained 3.84% variance of the total TEC score.

Further exploration of the associations between the CBCL scales and each TEC component revealed significant correlations (one-tailed) for both the internalizing broad and syndrome scales. For the component VIII (mixed emotions) again positive correlations were found with the syndrome scales Somatic Complaints (r = 0.177, p < 0.05), Anxious/Depressed (r = 0.203, p < 0.05), and the broad scale Internalizing Problems (r = 0.194, p < 0.05). On the contrary, component V (reminder) was negatively correlated with the syndrome scale Withdrawn (r = −0.266, p < 0.01). None of these associations could be explained by extreme values. No further correlations between the remaining components and CBCL syndrome or broad scales could be found (all rs < 0.132, all ps ≥ 0.063).

# DISCUSSION

The aim of this study was to investigate emotion comprehension in 7- to 10-year old children from the general population. Moreover, interindividual differences in the association between emotion comprehension and internalizing and externalizing symptoms were investigated. Based on the SIP model (Crick and Dodge, 1994), the hypothesis of a negative association between emotion comprehension in TEC and both externalizing and internalizing symptoms was formulated.

Regarding the performance in the emotion comprehension tasks, 7-year-olds' scoring was as expected significantly worse than the performance of 9-year-olds and 10-year-olds. Also, 10 year-olds significantly outperformed the group of 8-year-olds. On component level, component I (recognition of facial expressions) and II (external causes of emotions) showed a ceiling effect with a rate of 100% correct answers by all children within the four age groups. This is not a surprising result since already toddlers understand facial expressions of their caregiver during social referencing (Sorce et al., 1985), and 3- to 4-year-old children make precise distinctions between facial expressions of basic emotions and understand situations as their elicitor.

#### TABLE 1 | Distribution (frequency and percentage) of correct answers to each TEC component across age groups and total sample.

TEC, Test of Emotion Comprehension; n, sample size; M, mean; SD, standard deviation; I, recognition; II, external cause; III, desire-based; IV, belief-based; V, reminder; VI, regulation; VII, hiding; VIII, mixed emotions, IX, morality; K–W = χ 2 (3) of Kruskal–Wallis-Test, two-tailed; ∗p < 0.05, ∗∗p < 0.01.

TABLE 2 | Explained variance in total TEC score of the control variables age, bilingual upbringing, paternal working hours, and either Somatic Complaints (Model 1) or Anxious/Depressed (Model 2).

Multiple regression with total TEC score as dependent variable, and age, bilingual upbringing (0–1 dummy coded), paternal working hours (0–1 dummy coded, with full-time employment as reference group), and mean T-value of either Somatic Complaints (Model 1) or Anxious/Depressed (Model 2). ∗p < 0.05, ∗∗p < 0.01, ∗∗∗p < 0.001.

Looking at the components of the mental and reflective phase, an increase in correct responses over different age groups is evident. These results are in line with the assumption of a maturation of emotion comprehension throughout pre-school years (e.g., Pons et al., 2004; Janke, 2008). Component IX (asking for emotions elicited by an action, which satisfies desires but leads to a moral conflict) was the most difficult component and was answered correctly by only 47.4% of the total sample. This replicates the finding by Janke (2008) that German children less often ascribe the correct negative emotion "sad" to a moral conflict than British children do. This can be explained due to differences in the development of social norms or differences in parental rules between both countries, or due to changes in the meaning of the emotional expressions caused by the translation of the TEC. Lagattuta (2005) investigated emotion comprehension in ambiguous situations in 4- to 7-year-olds and adults. In her study, participants were asked to describe the emotion elicited by scenarios, in which the protagonists break rules to fulfill a specific desire. Older children and adults more often predicted next to negative also mixed emotions as a result to a transgression. Therefore, ascribing the single basic emotion "sad" as the right answer to morally wrong behavior might not fully cover the content of the elicited emotional experience. Instead of using forced-choice answers, it would be interesting to let children with German mother tongue freely describe the elicited emotions.

In this study, we were not able to replicate the abovementioned association between language abilities and emotion comprehension. The explanation for this might be the chosen age range. Looking at the study by Pons et al. (2003), the groups of 8-to-9-year-olds and 10-to-11-year-olds did neither differ significantly in their language abilities. Therefore, it is likely that differences in language development at this age are not strong enough to be detected by the language test used in this study.

Despite the missing association between general receptive language skills and emotion comprehension, children with a bilingual background showed a better overall emotion comprehension compared to monolingual children. The second languages of the bilingual children in our sample were French, Polish, Russian, English, Italian, or Montenegrin. Therefore, their advantage cannot be explained by a simply difference between the cultures of the first and second languages. According to research from social cognition, Goetz (2003) conducted a study with 3 and 4-year-olds being raised either monolingual or bilingual in English and/or Mandarin Chinese, and reported an advantage for bilingual children in their understanding of Theory of Mind tasks. The author's explanation refers to the fact that children raised bilingual learn to refer to the same concept from different language perspectives, enhancing their understanding of the bare existence of different systems and also train their ability for metarepresentation. The explanations presented by Goetz (2003) might also be applicable for the associations between bilingualism and emotion comprehension, since especially the higher components of emotion comprehension from the mental and reflective phases require sophisticated abilities in perspective taking. Particularly with regard to the observed cultural deviations in ranking order of the TEC (see e.g., Roazzi et al., 2009), it would be interesting to not only compare emotion comprehension in mono- vs. bilingual samples, but also subgroups of bilingual children from different cultural backgrounds.

Paternal working hours showed a low-to-medium negative correlation with the total TEC score. Therefore, children with fathers working full-time showed a significant lower level of emotion comprehension than children of fathers with either half-time or no employment. It is important to note that, we did not individually assess, why fathers were unemployed or working part-time. Therefore, we cannot conclude whether parttime or no employment necessarily represents a critical living situation regarding the socioeconomic status. It might be possible that ongoing studies or paternal leave could be reasons for this, which is not equivalent to a critical living situation with one partner being long-term unemployed. Looking at the importance of relationships among family members for the development of emotion comprehension (e.g., Colle and Del Giudice, 2011) and results from attachment literature about the unique contribution of child-father quality of attachment on their social development and adjustment (e.g., Grossmann et al., 2002), one possible explanation for this association could be that children have both a more regular, vivid exchange and closer relationship with fathers not working full-time. Lagattuta and Wellman (2002) found that conversations with the father play an important role for the development of mental states understanding. Since higher levels of emotion comprehension require sophisticated skills in perspective taking, a more regular exchange with the father might positively influence higher levels of social cognition and by this also influence emotion understanding. Future research needs to investigate the paternal role for emotion comprehension beyond the pre-school years to test this assumption.

The main goal of this study was to investigate the relation between internalizing and externalizing symptoms and emotion comprehension. As the ceiling effect of the TEC components I and II revealed, none of the children in our sample had difficulties labeling emotions or understanding external events as their causes. This is in line with findings by Trentacosta and Fine (2010), who could not report significant associations between discrete emotion comprehension and externalizing or internalizing symptoms for the age group 6–11 years. Noteworthy, the reported negative associations between understanding of discrete emotions and behavior problems in older children originated mostly from samples categorized by clinical diagnoses or by placement status (e.g., in a detention center).

For externalizing symptoms, no significant correlations were found with the total TEC score or individual, more complex components, neither for the overall Externalizing Problems scale nor on level of the two syndrome scales Rule-Breaking and Aggressive Behavior. Therefore, the hypothesis of an altered comprehension of others' emotion in children showing externalizing behavior could not be confirmed and is in line with findings by Belacchi and Farina (2010) that pre-schoolers who were classified as member of hostile, aggressive social groups like bullies, their reinforcers and assistants, show overall no correlation with the TEC components in contrast to children who were attributed with prosocial roles.

For internalizing symptoms, the initial hypothesis could only be confirmed in terms of a relatively small negative correlation between the syndrome scale Withdrawn and component V (reminder). Hence, children showing higher levels of withdrawn behavior were less often able to name the right emotion elicited by specific reminders. This result is in line with the abovementioned results by longitudinal and cross- sectional studies investigating the relation between emotion comprehension and internalizing symptoms (e.g., Fine et al., 2003). However, further research is needed to confirm the component specificity of this exploratory finding. Contrary to our expectation, we found a small positive correlation between the overall score of emotion comprehension and the syndrome scales Somatic Complaints and Anxious/Depressed, explaining 2.37 and 3.84% of variance, respectively. Therefore, children with reported higher levels of internalizing symptoms showed a significantly better understanding of others' emotion. In general, children with these symptoms more often report low selfesteem, insecurity, and fear of exclusion and devaluation in social contexts (Luebbe et al., 2010). Further, brooding and worrying on potential or actual experiences and emotions is a common symptom among anxious-depressed children and youth (Verstraeten et al., 2011). Because of their fear of devaluation, children with internalizing symptoms might therefore more frequently think about others' minds and motives and by this actually train their understanding of others' emotions. An interesting phenomenon supporting this assumption is that of co-rumination among children and adolescents with internalizing problems. Co-rumination is defined as the excessively discussion of personal problems within a dyadic relationship (Rose, 2002). According to Rose (2002), the repeated discussion of especially problematic experiences and negative emotions does on the one hand strengthen the

specific friendship, but on the other hand also contribute to the stability of internalizing symptoms (see also Rose et al., 2007). With reference to the reported important role of internal state and emotional talk for understanding others' mind and emotions (e.g., Pons et al., 2003), the mutual encouragement in co-ruminating dyads to focus on and analyze emotions might in contrast to withdrawn children further train their perspective taking skills and emotion comprehension.

With regard to the diverging effects for the internalizing subgroups, Bell et al. (2009) reported individual differences in information processing patterns among children with internalizing symptoms. While children with both depressive and anxious symptoms showed a negative style in processing social information, children with depressive symptoms additionally less often made positive attributions to social situations than anxious children. While the assessment of emotion comprehension with the TEC focusses on the understanding of others' emotional states in a specific situation, in studies focusing on SIP there are often scenarios presented in which the participant is asked to evaluate the social behavior and intentions of the protagonist above merely labeling a specific emotion. Therefore, one explanation for these divergent results could be that children with elevated levels of anxious/depressed symptoms can generally understand others' emotions, but rather struggle with the evaluation of social scenarios, others' intentions and social behavior.

Further, studies reporting a negative association between higher order emotion comprehension and anxious/depressed symptoms mainly stem from clinical samples (e.g., Meerum Terwogt, 1990; Bender et al., 2015). The divergent direction of associations for this study leads to the conclusion that while children from the general population having elevated but not clinically relevant levels of symptoms can master the different components of emotion comprehension, and even show a better performance, clinically diagnosed children might have problems in emotion comprehension due to the severity of their symptoms.

The assumptions about the relation between the TEC components and internalizing and externalizing syndromes in community and clinical samples clearly need further investigation. Especially, for children with externalizing symptoms more research is required.

Further, it would be interesting to investigate the nature behind the differences found for the three internalizing syndrome scales, and which individual associations occur between higher levels of emotion comprehension and somatic complaints, depression and different forms of anxiety with or without social withdrawal.

One limitation of this study is that, we assessed children's behavior and emotional problems by parent-report only. It has been critically claimed that parents and children show discrepancies in reporting on externalizing and internalizing symptoms: While for externalizing symptoms due to a lack of awareness children tend to report less problems than parents, it is vice versa for internalizing symptoms (Seiffge-Krenke and Kollmar, 1998). However, experts agree that around the age of eight children can reliably report on their mental health (Riley, 2004). Therefore, it might be more reliable to assess especially internalizing symptoms directly by children's reports or multiple sources. Another limitation of this study is the lack of diversity in educational background. 69.7% of the fathers and 58.2% of the mothers had a high school or university degree, which is above the German average. Therefore, generalization of these results is limited. We conducted regression analyses to investigate, how much variance of emotion comprehension is explained by the assessed variables. We want to emphasize that due to the crosssectional design of our study, a causal interpretation of the observed associations is not possible.

Finally, in our sample the gender was unbalanced with 72 girls and 63 boys. Even though the difference in number of participants between the two genders was rather small compared to the full sample, this should be mentioned concerning the generalizability of our results

In sum, the results of this study support the assumption of the development of emotion comprehension from a general, external to a deeper, complex understanding (e.g., Pons et al., 2004). In concordance with Janke (2008), the ninth TEC component addressing emotion after transgression of a moral rule turned out to be the most difficult one. Whether this is caused by cultural differences or due to a methodological artifact needs further investigation.

With regard to interindividual differences in this development, we found that emotion comprehension develops with increasing age, and benefits from bilingual upbringing. Moreover, emotion comprehension seems to be related to paternal working hours in such ways that children showed slightly worse abilities in understanding others' emotions with increasing working hours of their fathers.

To our knowledge, this is the first study simultaneously testing the impact of both externalizing and internalizing symptoms on emotion understanding operationalized by the TEC. The assumption of a negative association between externalizing and internalizing symptoms due to an altered SIP could only be partially confirmed. While no relationship was found between externalizing symptoms and emotion comprehension, we found different response patterns in the TEC in children with reported anxious/depressed symptoms and social withdrawal, implicating an individual style of SIP. These findings need further investigation in samples both from the general population and being clinically diagnosed with internalizing problems.

# ETHICS STATEMENT

The present study was approved by the local ethics committee of Saarland University (Faculty 5, leader: Prof. Dr. König). Informed written consent was required for all participants prior to the onset of the study. All parents were informed in detail about the study procedure and that participation was voluntary and could be stopped at any point of the experiment. The present study conducted research with school-aged children. However, the present study only included behavioral measurements and questionnaires without any risk of harm for our participants. No drugs, potentially dangerous setups or other risky procedures were applied.

#### AUTHOR CONTRIBUTIONS

fpsyg-07-01917 December 5, 2016 Time: 16:0 # 10

AG is the first author of the manuscript. She conducted the experiment of the present study and ran the main analyses of the collected data. AH was responsible for the main supervision during the conduction of the experiment. She helped with the manuscript by giving comments on the report of statistical results and extensive proof reading. Furthermore, she was mainly involved in formulating the research question and hypotheses. CM gave extensive feedback on the drafts of the manuscript. Her main contribution was in the writing process of the introduction and the discussion of the manuscript. Moreover, she gave extensive feedback for statististical analyses, the report of statistical results and on formal requirements for the submission. Moreover, she was responsible for proofreading the manuscript. GA gave extensive feedback during both the

#### REFERENCES

conduction of the experiment and writing the manuscript. She extensively discussed the findings and wrote parts of the manuscript. Moreover, GA was involved in the proof reading process and the final feedback for the manuscript. Overall, all authors extensively contributed to the present submission and were involved in the writing and feedbacking process at any time.

#### ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We thank Christoph Kowalski for his help with data collection and all parents and children who participated in this study. We also thank Bettina Janke for helpful comments regarding the testing procedure and coding of the German version of the Test of Emotion Comprehension.

and aggression. J. Child Psychol. Psychiatry 43, 901–916. doi: 10.1111/1469- 7610.00139

Erwachsenenalter. Z. Kl. Psych. Psychoth. 29, 263–275. doi: 10.1026//0084-5345. 29.4.263

**Conflict of Interest Statement:** The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

The reviewer AP and the handling Editor declared their shared affiliation, and the handling Editor states that the process nevertheless met the standards of a fair and objective review.

Copyright © 2016 Göbel, Henning, Möller and Aschersleben. 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.

# Sincere, Deceitful, and Ironic Communicative Acts and the Role of the Theory of Mind in Childhood

Francesca M. Bosco1,2 and Ilaria Gabbatore1,3 \*

1 Department of Psychology, Center for Cognitive Science, University of Turin, Turin, Italy, 2 Neuroscience Institute of Turin, University of Turin, Turin, Italy, 3 Faculty of Humanities, Research Unit of Logopedics, Child Language Research Center, University of Oulu, Oulu, Finland

The aim of the study is to investigate the relationship among age, first- and second-order Theory of Mind and the increasing ability of children to understand and produce different kinds of communicative acts – sincere, ironic, and deceitful communicative acts – expressed through linguistic and extralinguistic expressive means. To communicate means to modify an interlocutor's mental states (Grice, 1989), and pragmatics studies the inferential processes that are necessary to fill the gap, which often exists in human communication, between the literal meaning of a speaker's utterance and what the speaker intends to communicate to the interlocutor. We administered brief video-clip stories showing different kinds of pragmatic phenomena – sincere, ironic, and deceitful communicative acts - and first- and second-order ToM tasks, to 120 children, ranging in age from 3 to 8 years. The results showed the existence of a trend of difficulty in children's ability to deal with both linguistic and extralinguistic pragmatic tasks, from the simplest to the most difficult: sincere, deceitful, and ironic communicative acts. A hierarchical regression analysis indicated that age plays a significant role in explaining children's performance on each pragmatic task. Furthermore, the hierarchical regression analysis revealed that first-order ToM has a causal role in explaining children's performance in handling sincere and deceitful speech acts, but not irony. We did not detect any specific role for second-order ToM. Finally, ToM only partially explains the observed increasing trend of difficulty in children's pragmatic performance: the variance in pragmatic performance explained by ToM increases between sincere and deceitful communicative acts, but not between deceit and irony. The role of inferential ability in explaining the improvement in children's performance across the pragmatic tasks investigated is discussed.

Keywords: pragmatics, development, theory of mind, deceit, irony, direct and indirect speech acts

# INTRODUCTION

Pragmatic ability refers to the use of language (Levinson, 1983) and other expressive means, such as non-verbal/extralinguistic means, i.e., gestures and body movements (Bara, 2010), to convey a specific meaning in a given context. Interesting examples of such ability are indirect speech acts, meaning acts through which the speaker communicates more than is literally said to the listener (Searle, 1975); deceitful communicative acts, meaning intentional attempts to manipulate

#### Edited by:

Anne Henning, SRH Hochschule für Gesundheit Gera, Germany

#### Reviewed by:

Cecilia Ines Calero, Unidad de Neurobiología Aplicada (CEMIC) and Torcuato Di Tella University, Argentina Cristina Colonnesi, University of Amsterdam, Netherlands

#### \*Correspondence:

Ilaria Gabbatore<EMAIL_ADDRESS><EMAIL_ADDRESS>
#### Specialty section:

This article was submitted to Developmental Psychology, a section of the journal Frontiers in Psychology

Received: 01 August 2016 Accepted: 04 January 2017 Published: 30 January 2017

#### Citation:

Bosco FM and Gabbatore I (2017) Sincere, Deceitful, and Ironic Communicative Acts and the Role of the Theory of Mind in Childhood. Front. Psychol. 8:21. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2017.00021

the listener's mental state in order to induce them to believe something untrue (Perner, 1991); and irony, meaning communicative acts expressing the opposite of what is meant by the speaker (Grice, 1989).

Evidence in the literature show that pragmatic ability correlates with Theory of Mind (ToM; Premack and Woodruff, 1978), i.e., the human ability to attribute mental states to oneself and to other individuals. Evidence also show that this ability increases during childhood (Wellman and Liu, 2004) and adolescence (Bosco et al., 2014, 2016; Brizio et al., 2015). Similarly, the increasing ability of children to manage these pragmatic phenomena as they grow older has been well documented in the literature. At around one year of age children start to understand and use direct speech acts, meaning utterances that express literally and exactly what the speaker intends to say (Searle, 1975), in order to communicate with another person (Garvey, 1984). However, children also become able to handle indirect speech acts early on in their development. Reeder (1980), for example, showed that starting from 2;6 years of age, children understand equally well, in an adequate context, that direct utterances like 'I want you to do that' and indirect requests like 'Would you mind doing that?' have the same conventional communicative meaning (see also Bernicot and Legros, 1987). Bucciarelli et al. (2003) also showed that, starting from 2;6 years of age, children understand direct and conventional forms of indirect speech acts ("Would you mind" "Do you know?", etc) equally well, and that such ability increases with age (see Bosco and Bucciarelli, 2008).

Studies in the literature have shown that children's ability to deal with verbal deceit also increases with age. In particular, starting from three years of age (Lewis, 1993; Bussey, 1999), children start using lies, meaning false utterances proffered with the intention of avoiding a disagreeable consequence such as a punishment (Leekman, 1992). Talwar and Crossman (2011) argue, in their review of the literature, that a child's ability to lie could be considered normative, testifying the child's social and cognitive development. The ability to handle lies of different complexity evolves during the pre-school to school period: as they grow up, children become able to consider the speaker's intention and the impact of the social acceptability of lying and they start deceiving (for a review, see Talwar and Crossman, 2011).  Peskin (1996) claims that, in order to comprehend deceit, the speaker must take as shared with the listener something the speaker does not really believe. Peskin also claims that it is necessary to understand that the listener thus comes to hold a false belief, and observes how starting from the age of 4, children fully comprehend the speaker's intention to deceive. The ability to deceive has thus been frequently explained on the basis of the ability to use a fully developed ToM (Chandler et al., 1989; Polak and Harris, 1999; Ma et al., 2015). Talwar et al. (2007, p. 804) for example affirm that "Lying, in essence, is ToM in action"; to deceive consists of creating a false-belief in the interlocutor's mind (Lee, 2000). In particular, Talwar et al. (2007) investigated the relation between first- and second- order ToM and children's ability to lie. First-order ToM involves the comprehension of another person's belief about a certain state of the world, while second-order ToM involves the ability to infer what one person believes about another person's thoughts, meaning to understand nested mental states (Perner and Wimmer, 1985). Talwar et al. (2007) reported a correlation between 6 and 11-yearold children's second-order ToM and the ability to lie. Similarly, Cheung et al. (2015) found a correlation between 7 and 9-yearold children's second-order ToM and their ability to understand a liar's intention. The increasing ability of children to manage more complex forms of deceit has thus been explained on the basis of the children's development from first-order to second-order ToM. However, the exact role of (first- and second-order) ToM in explaining a growing child's ability to manage deceit is not yet completely clear (Talwar and Crossman, 2011). For example, some authors (Russell et al., 1995), claimed that not yet fully developed ToM abilities are not the best factor for explaining children's difficulty in managing complex deceit, and proposed that the executive demand (in terms of executive functions as planning and shifting) that the comprehension of complex deceit requires is the best explanatory factor. Bosco and Bucciarelli (2008) also argued that ToM did not seem to be the best factor for explaining children's ability to manage deceitful speech acts of increasing complexity.

Focusing now on irony, in its easiest form, this typically takes place when an utterance expresses the opposite of what the speaker means (Grice, 1989). In particular, irony involves a discrepancy between the literal meaning and the speaker's communicative intent (Mey, 2001). Children usually start to develop the ability to recognize ironic speech acts between five and six years of age (Dews et al., 1996; Harris and Pexman, 2003; Filippova and Astington, 2010), although younger children may sometimes also understand irony (Loukusa and Leinonen, 2008; Angeleri and Airenti, 2014) and such ability improves over time (Demorest et al., 1984; Dews et al., 1996; Dews and Winner, 1997; Bosco and Bucciarelli, 2008; Filippova and Astington, 2008). Loukusa and Leinonen (2008), for example, found a significant difference between 6- and 7-year-olds in their ability to provide a correct explanation in a comprehension task on a simple ironic utterance, and Bosco and Bucciarelli (2008) reported that children of 6, 8, and 9 years of age found it easier to comprehend simple forms of irony, that is, utterances directly in contrast with the background knowledge, than complex ones, involving utterances implying knowledge that is in contrast with the background scenario.

According to Winner (1997), in order to interpret an ironic utterance correctly, the child must have the ability to detect incongruity or falsehood, to avoid mistaking irony for error, to understand another person's beliefs, and to avoid interpreting irony as deception. In line with this theoretical proposal, Nilsen et al. (2011) showed that second-order ToM is correlated with children's comprehension of verbal irony. Specifically, they pointed out that adults and older children aged between 8 and 10, but not younger children aged 6 to 7 years, were able to recognize that listeners require contextual knowledge to comprehend irony.

The studies in the literature have mainly focused on one single pragmatic phenomenon (and its possible relation with ToM) at

a time, and only a few have undertaken a direct comparison of the different phenomena (Bosco and Bucciarelli, 2008; Bucciarelli et al., 2003). In particular, Bosco et al. (2012a, 2013) provided a broad assessment of the abilities of children ranging in age from 5 to 8;6 years, to comprehend and produce: direct and indirect speech acts (that the authors define as standard communication acts), and deceitful and ironic communication acts, using both linguistic and nonverbal/extralinguistic means of expression, such as gestures and body posture. The authors reported that the ability to perform all the pragmatic tasks investigated increases with age in children aged between 5 and 8;6 years, and their ability to deal with standard communication acts (direct and indirect), and deceitful and ironic speech acts also improves. In line with Bucciarelli et al. (2003), the authors explained the existence of such an increasing trend of difficulty on the basis of the Cognitive Pragmatic theory (Bara, 2010) and the increasing complexity of the inferential processes involved in the various pragmatic tasks investigated. The ability to infer refers to the cognitive capacity necessary to fill the gap, which often exists, between the literal meaning of an utterance and what the speaker actually means (Searle, 1975). According to the Cognitive Pragmatic theory, in expressing a sincere communicative act (direct and indirect communicative acts), the actor says something that is in line with his/her private beliefs. In terms of the inferential processes involved, the comprehension or production of a sincere communicative act merely requires the partner to refer to the background knowledge shared between the interlocutors. By contrast, the comprehension and production of deceitful and ironic communicative acts requires more complex inferential processes. In particular, in deceit, what the speaker says is in conflict with his private knowledge, but it does not contradict the knowledge given as shared with the partner. In a case of deceit, the partner has to recognize the difference between what is expressed and what the speaker privately entertains. In irony, the actor's communicative intention is again in conflict with his private knowledge, as in the previous case, but it also contradicts the knowledge given as shared with the partner. This makes an ironic communicative act more difficult to entertain than a deceitful one (for a detailed description, see Bucciarelli et al., 2003; Bosco and Bucciarelli, 2008; Bara, 2010).

However, a possible different explanation for the increasing trend of difficulty in the comprehension and production of the pragmatic tasks described above implies a role for ToM, and in particular it states that ToM could play a greater role in deceitful communicative acts (Flanagan, 1992; Sodian and Frith, 1992) and ironic communicative acts (Happé, 1993) as compared to standard (direct and indirect) ones. Winner and Leekman (1991) assume that it is more difficult to understand irony than deceit because the former requires second-order ToM, whereas the latter only requires first-order ToM. In particular, Sullivan et al. (1995) found that starting from 7 years of age, children can distinguish lies from jokes, and they attribute this to the acquired ability to attribute second-order mental states.

To the best of our knowledge, no previous studies have empirically investigated such a hypothesis by assessing, in the same sample of participants, the possible role of first- and second-order ToM in explaining children's increasing ability to comprehend and produce sincere (direct and indirect), deceitful, and ironic communicative acts. For this reason, the aim of the study was to investigate the increasing ability of children to manage different kinds of pragmatic phenomena, i.e., direct and indirect, deceitful, and ironic speech acts, and the possible role of first- and second-order ToM in explaining such performance. In detail, we wished to replicate the findings of Bosco et al. (2013, see also Bucciarelli et al., 2003; Bosco and Bucciarelli, 2008), and expected: (i) to find children's performance on all the investigated tasks to improve with age; (ii) to find an increasing trend of difficulty in the comprehension and production of the investigated pragmatic phenomena, namely sincere communicative acts (direct and indirect), and deceitful and ironic communicative acts, in both the linguistic and non-verbal/extralinguistic modalities, including the use of gestures and body movements. In particular, the novelty of the present study was (iii) to explore the causal role of ToM (first- and second-order) in explaining such an improvement in their performance, in both the linguistic and non-verbal/extralinguistic modalities, within each investigated phenomenon. Moreover, (iv) we investigated the possible role of ToM in explaining the increasing trend of difficulty we expected to find across the various pragmatic phenomena investigated.

#### MATERIALS AND METHODS

#### Participants

The sample consisted of 120 Italian children (60 males and 60 females) ranging in age from 3 to 8 years. In order to compare the subsamples' performance in a more reliable way, the sample was organized in 4 age groups so that there was a one year difference between one age group and the next: Group A (3 years; 6 months – 4 years) (M = 3;10; SD = 0;2); Group B (5–5;6) (M = 5;3; DS = 0;2); Group C (6;6–7) (M = 6;10; DS = 0;2); Group D (8–8;6) (M = 8;3; DS = 0;3). Each age group was composed of 30 children and was balanced for gender, including an equal number of males and females.

The children were recruited from four different schools in the Piedmont area (Italy). Research assistants visited the schools before data collection commenced, and provided the teachers with details about the study. A letter containing all the details about the research was sent to the children's families, together with an informed consent form, which the parents were required to complete. Only children whose parents gave their consent were included in the sample.

#### Material

The experimental protocol consisted of a selection of 48 items taken from the linguistic and extralinguistic scales of the ABaCo (Sacco et al., 2008; Angeleri et al., 2012; Bosco et al., 2012a), a validated assessment tool to evaluate pragmatic abilities in typical (Bosco et al., 2013) and atypical (Angeleri et al., 2016) development. Examples of ABaCo items are provided in Appendix A.

For each expressive modality (i.e., linguistic and extralinguistic), the experimental task contained the same number and structure of items, and assessed the same type of pragmatic phenomena (half in comprehension and half in production):

Each item consists of a video lasting 20–25 s, comprising a controlled number of words (range: 7 ± 2), and representing a communicative interaction between two people. The linguistic items investigate pragmatic phenomena expressed primarily through linguistic means, while the extralinguistic items are composed of communicative acts expressed through gestures (for a detailed description of the items, see Bosco et al., 2013).

In comprehension tasks, participants observed an interaction between two actors, and they were required to understand what was communicated (e.g., In your opinion, what did the girl want to say to the boy?). In production tasks, participants observed only the initial part of an interaction, and they were asked to produce a communicative act appropriate with respect to the proposed communicative situation (e.g., The child doesn't want to be discovered. What could he say?).

For each pragmatic task, it was possible to obtain a score of "0" when the answer was considered incorrect and "1" when the answer was considered correct. More details concerning scoring criteria are reported in Appendix A (see also Sacco et al., 2008; Bosco et al., 2013). Inter-rater reliability was calculated using Cohen's Kappa on the scores assigned to 40 randomly selected children (about 33% of the total sample): K was 0.67 (p < 0.001) 95% CI (0.653, 0.696), indicating substantial agreement (Landis and Koch, 1977).

In addition to the pragmatic tasks, a number of ToM tests were administered to the children. See Appendix B for a detailed description of the items.

#### Sally and Ann Task

In this task (Baron-Cohen et al., 1985), the child is required to observe a scene acted out by two paper dolls, Sally and Ann: Sally places her ball in the basket and leaves the scene. Ann moves the ball from the basket to the box. Then the child is required to reply to a test question (When Sally comes back, where does she think the ball is?) and a justification question (Why does Sally think the ball is there?). A score of 1 is gained when both the test and the justification questions are answered correctly.

#### Modified Smarties Task

This is a revised version of the original task developed by Perner et al. (1987). Because nowadays many children are no longer familiar with the famous candy brand, we introduced a packet of a currently famous brand of potato chips as the target object. During the task, the experimenter shows the packet of chips to every child and asks: What is in there? Then the experimenter opens the packet, showing that it contains pencils rather than the expected chips. The next question is: What will someone else, who has not seen what the packet contains, think is in there, before it is opened? A score of 1 is obtained when the child replies "chips" and a score of 0 is attributed to any other kind of answer.

#### John and Mary and Maxi Stories

These tasks (Sullivan et al., 1995) are a modified version of those used by Wimmer and Perner (1983) and Perner and Wimmer (1985) respectively, and they are told using cardboard puppets in order to reduce the memory load. The two stories assess second-order ToM, and they have an identical structure but different characters and settings. In the Maxi story, for example, the scenario is the following: Maxi and Bobby are in their kitchen when their mother brings in some chocolate. Maxi would like to have some chocolate and his mom tells him he can have some after walking the dog. Unbeknownst to Maxi but not to Bobby, their mother takes the chocolate to the neighbor's place. Unbeknownst to Bobby, Maxi discovers that their mom has taken the chocolate to the neighbor's place. Bobby then goes to look for Maxi in the yard. His mother tells him that Maxi has gone to get some chocolate. The task consists of a 'second-order ignorance question' (i.e., Does Bobby know that Maxi knows where the chocolate is?) and a 'second-order belief question' (i.e., Where does Bobby go to look for Maxi?). Along with the story-telling, a number of factual questions (e.g., Why is Maxi in the yard?) and first-order ToM questions (e.g., Does Maxi know where the chocolate is now?) were used to help the children to follow the storyline, but they were not taken into account in the scoring procedure. The children's answers could be scored 1 (correct) or 0 (incorrect) for both second-order ignorance and belief questions. The mean value of the scores obtained from the two test questions was run to perform the analyses.

#### Picture Sequencing Task

Within the present study, just part of the original task (Langdon and Coltheart, 1999; Porter et al., 2008) was administered: the tasks used comprise six stories, including two social scripts (more than one person interacting in everyday social routines) and four false-belief sequences (a person, unaware of an event in a story, acts on a false belief). Internal consistency among these items was calculated (Cronbach's alpha = 0.77). Each story was depicted in a set of four black-and-white picture cards. Two practice runs were used to allow the child to become familiar with the procedure of the task, and these were not considered in the scoring procedure. The set of cards for each story was placed face down in front of the child, and the child was required to arrange the cards in the correct order to tell the story according to the logical sequence of events, like in a comic-strip. Scores ranged from 0–6; each sequence scored 2 points if the first card was in the correct position, 2 points if the last card was in the correct position, and 1 point for each of the second and third cards being in the correct positions. Failure to produce a sequence was scored as 0.

Inter-rater reliability was calculated using Cohen's Kappa also for ToM tasks scores attributed by two raters in about 33% of the total sample: Sally and Ann task, Modified Smarties task, John and Mary and Maxi Stories task. It was not calculated on the

Picture Sequencing task scores, because the scoring procedures for this test only involve comparing the order of the sequences provided by the child with the correct ones provided by the test instructions. Since no different interpretation is possible, we did not consider it necessary to have a second rater for such scores. K ranged from 0.76 to 1 (p < 0.001), indicating substantial to almost perfect agreement (Landis and Koch, 1977).

#### Procedure

The experimenters visited the schools before the beginning of the study, in order to familiarize with the children. The children dealt with the experimental tasks in a single individual session, lasting approximately 50 min and performed in a quiet room at the school. The video-taped stories were shown to the children one at a time, using a portable computer, and each session was video-recorded, to allow offline coding procedures. The tasks were presented in two different random orders, A and B; the participants in each group were balanced for age and gender, and were assigned to order A or B of the protocol in a balanced way. The ToM tests were also balanced, so that they were presented to half of the participants before the presentation of the pragmatic protocol and to half of the participants after the presentation of the pragmatic protocol. Moreover, the ToM tasks were presented in two different random orders (first-order tasks followed by second-order tasks and vice versa). When performing the analyses, first- and second-order ToM scores were considered separately. In particular, the first-order ToM value was obtained using the average scores gained from the Sally and Ann, Smarties, and Picture Sequencing tasks. Likewise, the second-order ToM value was obtained by combining the average scores obtained from the John and Mary and Maxi tasks.

#### Data Analysis

The distribution of scores for each kind of task was not normal in most age groups. In particular, the Kolmogorov–Smirnov test showed the distribution to be normal only in a few cases, namely extralinguistic deceit in group B and extralinguistic irony in both groups C and D, while data were not normally distributed in any of the other cases: linguistic sincere acts 0.001 < p < 0.011; linguistic deceit 0.001 < p < 0.042; linguistic irony: 0.001 < p < 0.027; extralinguistic sincere acts p < 0.001; extralinguistic deceit: 0.001 < p < 0.200; extralinguistic irony 0.001 < p < 0.181. We also performed a Shapiro–Wilk test, which confirmed the previous results: the distribution of scores was normal in only a few cases, namely linguistic irony in group D, extralinguistic deceit in group B, and extralinguistic irony in groups C and D; data were, instead, not normally distributed in any of the other cases: linguistic sincere acts.001 < p < 0.022; linguistic deceit 0.001 < p < 0.010; linguistic irony 0.001 < p < 0.164; extralinguistic sincere acts 0.002 < p < 0.010; extralinguistic deceit 0.001 < p < 0.178; extralinguistic irony 0.001 < p < 0.214. We thus conducted an arcsine transformation on the children's answers in each pragmatic task (linguistic and extralinguistic sincere communicative acts, deceit, and irony) and each ToM task (first- and second-order). We were thus able to perform parametric analyses while satisfying the required assumptions.

To investigate children's performance in managing different kinds of pragmatic tasks, we conducted a multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA), with age as between-subject factor (type of age group: Group A 3;6–4, Group B 5–5;6, Group C 6;6–7, and Group D 8–8;6) and performance at sincere communicative act, deceit, and irony as dependent variables on both the linguistic and the extralinguistic scales. Analogously, children's ability to manage different kinds of ToM tasks was investigated by conducting a MANOVA with age as between-subject factor (type of age group: Group A 3;6–4, Group B 5–5;6, Group C 6;6–7, and Group D 8–8;6) and performance at first- and second-order ToM tasks as dependent variables.

Moreover, in order to investigate the effect of performance on the different pragmatic tasks within each age group (type of pragmatic phenomena: sincere, deceit, irony), we performed separate ANOVA analyses, for both linguistic and extralinguistic tasks.

In order to investigate the correlation between pragmatic and ToM ability, we calculated the partial correlation (Pearson's r, controlling for age) between children's performance on pragmatic and ToM tasks in the overall sample.

Lastly, in order to investigate the specific effect of age and of first- and second-order ToM in explaining children's pragmatic performance, we conducted a hierarchical regression analysis, including three steps: Age (step1), first-order ToM (step2) and second-order ToM (step3). Such variables were entered into the regression model as predictors to detect their impact on children's performance on the pragmatic tasks (i.e., sincere, deceit and irony). Statistically significant correlations were found between linguistic and extralinguistic performance on the different types of tasks: sincere (r = 0.29; p = 0.001), deceit (r = 0.74; p < 0.001), irony (r = 0.63; p < 0.001). For this reason, and since the trends in scores were the same for both modalities in all age groups, in this regression analysis we collapsed the scores obtained for the linguistic and extralinguistic tasks into a single type of pragmatic task score. Despite the differences implied in these pragmatic phenomena, collapsing them into a single score provides a more statistically robust measure of overall pragmatic ability (Cronbach's alpha = 0.93).

# RESULTS

The scores obtained by each age group on the pragmatic and ToM tasks are summarized in **Tables 1** and **2**.

In **Tables 3** and **4** the correlation coefficients among pragmatic tasks and ToM tasks, respectively, are provided.

On the linguistic scale, the MANOVA revealed a significant effect of age on the pragmatic performance [F(9,348) = 8.97; p < 0.001; η 2 = 0.19]. Separate univariate ANOVAs on the outcome variables revealed a significant effect of age on deceits [F(3,116) = 36.77; p < 0.001; η 2 = 0.49] and ironies [F(3,116) = 12.09; p < 0.001; η 2 = 0.24] but a not significant effect on sincere communicative acts [F(3,116) = 2.12; p = 0.10; η 2 = 0.05]. Post hoc pairwise comparison (Bonferroni) between the performance of A vs. B, B vs. C and C vs. D age group at each

TABLE 1 | Performance of each age group at the pragmatic tasks, mean (standard deviation).

TABLE 2 | Performance of each age group at the Theory of Mind (ToM) tasks.

pragmatic task highlighted the following results: no differences were detected among the groups at the sincere acts (p = 1.0); the groups performed significantly differently at the deceitful acts (p < 0.001), with the only exception being Group C vs. Group D, which showed no differences (p = 1.0); finally, at the ironic tasks, a significant difference was found between Group A and B (p = 0.003), while no differences were detected between the remaining groups (0.999 < p < 1.0).

In terms of the extralinguistic scale, the MANOVA revealed a significant effect of age on the pragmatic performance [F(9,348) = 10.11; p < 0.001; η 2 = 0.21]. Separate univariate ANOVAs on the outcome variables revealed a significant effect of age on all the communicative acts investigated: sincere [F(3,116) = 20.51; p < 0.001; η 2 = 0.35], deceits [F(3,116) = 48.63; p < 0.001; η 2 = 0.56] and ironies [F(3,116) = 13.18; p < 0.001; η 2 = 0.25]. Post hoc pairwise comparison (Bonferroni) between the performance of each age group at each pragmatic task highlighted the following results: the groups performed significantly differently at the sincere (0.003 < p < 0.016) and deceitful acts (p < 0.001), with the only exception being Group C vs. Group D, which showed no differences both at sincere (p = 1.0) and at deceitful acts (p = 0.863); for what concerns ironies, again a significant difference was found between Group A and B (p = 0.033), while no differences were detected between the remaining groups (0.235 < p < 1.0).

The ANOVA analyses performed within each age group separately and concerning the linguistic tasks, revealed an effect of the type of task in all age groups [20.09 < F(2,58) < 57.06; p < 0.001; 0.41 < η 2 < 0.66]. Moreover, introducing contrasts for each analysis, we detected a linear contrast, depending on the type of pragmatic task in each age group [25.39 < F(1,29) < 145.53; p < 0.001;.47 < η 2 < 0.83]. The same pattern of results was

∗∗p < 0.01; ∗p < 0.05.

found concerning extralinguistic tasks: an effect of the type of task was detected in all age groups [14.21 < F(2,58) < 36.48; p < 0.001; 0.33 < η 2 < 0.56] and contrast analysis revealed a linear contrast, depending on the type of pragmatic task in each age group [24.60 < F(1,29) < 39.10; p < 0.001; 0.46 < η 2 < 0.61].

In terms of children's ability to manage different kinds of ToM tasks, the MANOVA revealed a significant effect of age on the children's performance [F(6,232) = 10.86; p < 0.001; η 2 = 0.22]. Separate univariate ANOVAs on the outcome variables revealed a significant effect of age on first-order ToM performance [F(3,116) = 27.60; p < 0.001; η 2 = 0.42] as well as on second-order ToM performance [F(3,116) = 7.37; p < 0.001; η 2 = 0.16]. Post hoc pairwise comparison (Bonferroni) between the performance of each age group at first-and second order ToM tasks revealed the following results: the groups performed significantly differently at the first-order ToM tasks (0.003 < p < 0.005) with the only exception being Group C vs. Group D, which showed no differences (p = 1.0); at the secondorder tasks, no differences were found between the performance of the age groups (0.512 < p < 1.0).

Partial correlation coefficients between linguistic and extralinguistic pragmatic tasks (comprehension and production ability) and overall ToM ability (first- and second-order tasks) are reported in **Table 5**.

As shown in **Table 5**, we found a significant correlation between overall ToM tasks and all the pragmatic tasks investigated, in both the Linguistic and Extralinguistic scales, with the only exception of sincere linguistic communicative acts and Extralinguistic irony. The same result applies for first-order ToM tasks. By contrast, the only significant relation we detected for second-order ToM tasks was between linguistic deceit and second-order ToM.

**Table 6** displays the results of multiple hierarchical regression analysis on the overall sample. In particular it shows all the coefficients of the regression models as well as the information about the summary of the model: adjusted regression coefficients (R 2 Adj. ) for each predictor variable, the change in R 2 after the addition of first- and second-order ToM (R 2 Change), the change in F (FChange), and its significance value (Sig. FChange).

The regression analysis revealed that age (Step 1) explains 26% of the variance in children's performance on sincere tasks, 53% on deceitful tasks and 26% on ironic tasks. The model also including children's performance on first-order ToM tasks as a regressor (Step 2) only significantly improved the prediction for sincere (i.e., direct and indirect communicative acts) and deceitful tasks, but not for ironic ones. The addition of scores for performance on second-order ToM tasks (Step 3) did not improve the prediction for any of the pragmatic tasks.

As a final point, the analyses also showed that within both the model including first-order ToM (Step 2) and the model comprising second-order ToM (Step 3), R 2 only partially follows the trend of increasing difficulty exhibited by children in solving pragmatic problems, when considering both linguistic and extralinguistic tasks, i.e., first-order ToM (sincere, R 2 = 0.304; deceit, R 2 = 0.558; irony R 2 = 0.269), second-order ToM (sincere, R 2 = 0.310; deceit, R 2 = 0.565; irony R 2 = 0.269). In particular, the R 2 value increases across tasks between sincere and deceitful communicative acts, but not between deceitful and ironic ones.

#### DISCUSSION

The goal of the present study was to investigate the possible role of ToM – both first- and second-order - in explaining children's ability to comprehend and produce different kinds of pragmatic phenomena, namely sincere (direct and indirect), deceitful, and ironic communicative acts, expressed through linguistic and nonverbal/extralinguistic modalities.

First of all, and in line with our expectation and the relevant literature (Bucciarelli et al., 2003; Bosco and Bucciarelli, 2008; Filippova and Astington, 2010; Talwar and Crossman, 2011; Bosco et al., 2013), overall our results showed that children's ability to comprehend and produce the pragmatic phenomena investigated increases with age, in both the linguistic and nonverbal/extralinguistic modalities. Analyzing deeper this result for each pragmatic task and comparing age groups we found that, for the linguistic modality, children showed no differences at the sincere acts, while performed significantly differently at the deceitful acts with the only exception of oldest groups of age of 6- vs. 8- year-olds children; for what concern ironic acts, younger group of 3- year-olds children showed a significant worse performance than all the other groups, while children belonging to the remaining age groups had comparable performance. We explain such results on the base of the Cognitive Pragmatic theory, proposing that, because of the inferential process involved, sincere communicative acts are the easiest task to solve for children and thus they performed quite well starting from 3;6–4 years of age. Always following the tenets of the Cognitive Pragmatic theory a deceitful communicative

TABLE 5 | Partial correlation (Pearson r, controlling for age) between overall ToM tasks (first- and second-order) and pragmatic tasks, in the overall group.

∗∗p < 0.01; ∗p < 0.05.

TABLE 6 | Hierarchical regression analysis: pragmatic tasks (linguistic and extralinguistic) in the overall group.

Variables significantly predicting pragmatic performance is marked in bold.

act represents a more difficult pragmatic task to solve and only starting from 6;6–7 years of age children handle it without errors. Finally, irony is the most difficult task to solve and it represents a really hard task to manage for children as young as 3;6–4 years of age. However, it remains a quite difficult task also for the older children. Globally considered the same pattern of results and the same explanation hold for the extralinguistic modality; the only exception is represented by the younger 3- and 5- years-olds, who showed differences in performance at sincere communicative acts. A possible explanation for this difference is that the extralinguistic modality was harder for 3- and 5- year-olds children to deal with and this additional difficulty allowed this difference in performance to emerge.

In line with our hypothesis, and considering each age group separately, we also found an increasing trend of difficulty in children's performance across the pragmatic tasks investigated: children were able to comprehend and produce sincere communicative acts more accurately than deceit, which was followed by ironic speech acts, which were the most difficult task to deal with. Considered overall, this linear increase in difficulty holds in both the linguistic and extralinguistic modality following the patterns of results found in previous studies (Bucciarelli et al., 2003; Bosco and Bucciarelli, 2008; Bosco et al., 2013).

The novelty of the present research was to explore the causal role of age and ToM – both first- and second-order - in explaining children's pragmatic performance, in both the linguistic and non-verbal/extralinguistic modalities. Some authors have indeed proposed that pragmatics/communicative ability involves mentalizing, i.e., ToM, abilities (Sperber and Wilson, 2002; Tirassa et al., 2006a,b; Tirassa and Bosco, 2008; Fernandez, 2011; Bosco et al., 2012b; Cummings, 2015). In line with this proposal we found a correlation, controlling for age, between overall ToM tasks (first- and second-order tasks) and linguistic and extralinguistic irony and deceit, but not

between linguistic sincere communicative acts and extralinguistic irony. The same pattern of results holds for first-order ToM. Considering second-order ToM, we only found a significant correlation with linguistic deceit.

The correlation we found between children's performance on ToM tasks (overall and first-order) and sincere acts may be considered a surprising result. We can explain this result by considering that half of the items making up our experimental material were indirect communicative acts. Studies in the literature have suggested that ToM has a role in the comprehension of indirect speech acts. For example, Corcoran et al. (1995) and Corcoran (2003) showed that patients with schizophrenia, a disorder explained (e.g., Frith, 1994) on the basis of a primary deficit in ToM, have difficulties in the comprehension of indirect speech acts.

Our results concerning the correlation between ToM (overall and first-order) and deceit are in line with the current literature (see for example Chandler et al., 1989; Polak and Harris, 1999; Ma et al., 2015). In particular, our result regarding the significant role played by second-order ToM in dealing with deceitful acts is in line with Talwar and Lee (2008). The authors showed that the performance of children aged from 3 to 8 years on second-order ToM tasks is related to their ability to maintain a plausible explanation in order to not reveal their lies. Some authors also found that second-order ToM ability correlates with pro-social lies (Cheung et al., 2015; Williams et al., 2016), which are considered more sophisticated than lies. In particular, Broomfield et al. (2002) found that only pro-social, but not other forms of lies, are related to second-order ToM. However, our experimental material did not include pro-social lies, so a direct comparison is not possible. Our results concerning the correlation between ToM (second-order) and irony are also consistent with the literature, in particular with Winner (1997), who argued for the role of second-order ToM in irony comprehension and Nilsen et al. (2011), who reported that second order ToM is correlated with children's comprehension of verbal irony.

Taken globally, our results are also in line with the literature concerning autism, a pathology characterized by a ToM impairment (Baron-Cohen et al., 1985) and showing how people with autism have difficulties in comprehending and producing indirect, deceitful and ironic communicative acts (Happé, 1993; Angeleri et al., 2016, for a review see Loukusa and Moilanen, 2009).