The study focuses on the mental state language kindergarten teachers use when narrating picture stories. The aims were to examine (a) individual differences in the frequency with which kindergarten teachers use mental state terms, (b) the types of mental state terms (e.g., emotion, desire, belief terms) teachers use most frequently, and (c) the effect that the content of the story to be narrated has on teachers’ use of mental state language. A total of 38 kindergarten teachers took part in the study. Participants were asked to narrate a familiar picture story and six short illustrated stories that fell into one of two categories: behavioral or mentalistic. Behavioral stories emphasized the story characters’ actions, whereas mentalistic stories emphasized the story characters’ mental states. Research Findings: The results showed a significant variation in kindergarten teachers’ use of mental state terms. Moreover, teachers used significantly more cognitive state terms than terms expressing other mental states (e.g., emotions and desires). The content of the picture story (behavioral, mentalistic) was not found to have an effect on teachers’ use of mental state language. Practice or Policy: Implications of these findings for educators are discussed.

The author examined the relation between individual differences in children's understanding of guilt and theory of mind (ToM) ability. Two hundred and eighteen 8- to 10-year-old children were asked to define what guilt is and report a personal experience in which they felt this emotion. ToM was assessed with the Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test (Children's version; Baron-Cohen et al., 2001) and with the Strange Stories test (Happè, 1994). There were marked differences in children's understanding of guilt even after controlling for age. Moreover, high levels of understanding of guilt were associated with high levels of performance on both ToM tests. The theoretical and practical implications of these results are discussed.

This article reports the results of a study which aimed to examine the development of children’s ability to depict loneliness in their drawings. Seventy-eight children and 20 adults took part in the study. Participants were first asked a series of questions assessing their conceptions of loneliness, and were then invited to draw a picture that conveys loneliness. The resulting drawings were coded and scored for the presence of the two dimensions of loneliness: cognitive and emotional. First, the authors examined the use by participants of graphic indicators denoting deficiencies in one’s social relations resulting to loneliness (cognitive dimension); second, they assessed the expressive strategies participants employed to convey the negative affect that typically accompanies loneliness in their drawings (emotional dimension). Finally, the authors tested the relationship between children’s definitions of loneliness with their drawings of the construct. The results show a clear developmental progression in children’s pictorial representations of loneliness. Whereas the majority of young children represented loneliness as the absence of a social network, older children used graphic indicators to convey both the absence of a social network and the sadness that accompanies loneliness. In contrast to children, adults consistently included symbolic or metaphoric graphic indicators in their drawings to convey the negative affect accompanying the experience of loneliness.

The study aimed to investigate whether the impact of mood state on children's choice of expressive strategies (literal and non-literal content and abstract) varies as a function of mood valence, age and topic to be drawn. The sample (N = 96) consisted of four groups of children aged 5, 7, 9 and 11years, respectively. Half of the children in each age group were induced with a positive mood state and the other half with a negative mood state. Following mood induction, children were asked to draw one of two topics, an animate (person) or an inanimate one (tree). The results showed that: (a) happiness and sadness activated similar expressive drawing strategies; (b) from the age of five years onwards children were able to use both literal and non-literal expressive strategies in their drawings; (c) non-literal content strategies were used more frequently compared to abstract ones by all age groups; and (d) topic had an effect on the choice of expressive strategies: children used more literal strategies for the depiction of the person and more non-literal ones for the depiction of the tree. The implications of these findings and future directions for research are discussed.