Developing a Theory of Mind Throughout Life

Question 1

Adults show difficulty with false belief as found by

Answer 1

Mitchell et al. 1996 in which Kevin didn’t know if it was milk or orange juice in the jug

Question 2

Mitchell et al. 1996 found adults struggle with false belief but suggested it was due to

Answer 2

Biases not errors - participants contaminated by knowledge

Question 3

Apperly et al. 2006 found that false beliefs and ToM is not processed automatically by demonstrating that participants took longer to…

Answer 3

Respond about the protagonists belief, but quickly to the true state of the reality.

Question 4

Ekman Faces show the standard 6 emotions:

Answer 4

Happy
Sad
Disgust
Fear
Surprise
Anger

Question 5

Baron-Cohen et al. 1997 used a variation of Ekman faces in what task

Answer 5

Reading the mind in the eyes

Question 6

What are the problems with Ekman faces in FB research?

Answer 6

 Failure to satisfy the ‘truth condition’ (West & Kenny, 2011)

 Inappropriate stimuli: posed, static, not caused by anything need natural stimuli, does the persons reaction take a cue about what happened to them?

Question 7

Pillai et al. 2012 recorded peoples natural reactions to faces and found that

Answer 7

Perceivers are good at establishing what the target was reacting to.

Question 8

What steps does theory of mind follow:

Answer 8

Perceiver
Target Behaviour
Targets Mind
Behaviour

Question 9

In Edey et al.’s 2016 experiment participants moved the triangles around the page to convey emotions and found

Answer 9

Perceivers found it harder to identify what was being conveyed when made by an autistic person compared to a cognitive typical individual.

Question 10

Shepard et al. 2016 found that when targets where 50:50 ASD and typical targets

Answer 10

Perceivers able to infer what they were reacting to, with story and compliment then ASD less readable and typical more readable.

Question 11

Shepard et al. 2016 ASD perceivers weren’t harder to read due to:

Answer 11

Being less expressive, found that they were equally expressive

Question 12

Tech et al. 2017 reordered participants looking at pleasant and unpleasant images and asked for people to establish if they were alone or not and found:

Answer 12

When people were alone and presented with a nasty image = more expressive

Question 13

Valindes et al. 2017 asked participants to think of positive thoughts (pride, and excitement) and negative thoughts (shame and guilt) and found:

Answer 13

Mediterraneans are better at reading minds than British people.

Question 14

Valindes et al. 2017 findings cannot be explained by

Answer 14

Own race effects

Question 15

Why may Mediterraneans be better at reading emotions?

Answer 15

Collectivist culture