Understanding ironic criticism and empathic praise: The role of emotive communication.

Ironic criticism and empathic praise are forms of social communication that influence the affective states of others in a negative or positive way. In a sample of 76 typically developing children and adolescents (mean age = 11 years; 4 months; SD: 2 years; 8 months), we studied how understanding of emotional expression (facial expression of emotion) and emotive communication (affective theory of mind) was related to the ability to understand negatively valenced ironic criticism and positively valenced empathic praise. We modelled comprehension of irony and empathy in school-aged children in relation to age and understanding of emotional expression and emotive communication. As expected, children showed significantly better understanding of emotional expression than emotive communication, which requires understanding why someone might mask their inner emotions. Meditational analyses showed that emotive communication partially mediated the relation between age and understanding ironic criticism and empathic praise. These findings suggest that the development of understanding irony and empathy over the school-age years is associated with affective attributions or affective theory of mind. Statement of contribution What is already known on this subject? Theory of mind has been found to be related to the developmental understanding of social communication. Correct interpretation of facial emotional cues is also important for interpreting social communication. What does this study add? Affective components (i.e., affective theory of mind) also contribute to the development of social communication. Emotive communication, the ability to modulate one's emotional expression according to social display rules may be predictive of social communication competency.

Theory of mind in middle childhood and early adolescence: Different from before?

Studies with preschool children have shown that language and executive function are important for theory of mind, but few studies have examined these associations in older children and in an integrative theory-guided manner. The theory of constructive operators was used as a framework to test a model of relations among mental attentional capacity, attentional inhibition, language, executive processes (shifting and updating), and higher order theory of mind in two groups of school-aged children: one in middle childhood (n=226; mean age=8.08years) and the other in early adolescence (n=216; mean age=12.09years). Results revealed a complex model of interrelations between cognitive resources and language in middle childhood that directly and indirectly predicted theory of mind. The model in early adolescence was less complex, however, and highlighted the importance of semantic language and shifting for theory of mind. Our findings suggest not only that contributors to theory of mind change over time but also that they may depend on the maturity level of the theory of mind system being examined.

Irony and empathy in children with traumatic brain injury.

Social communication involves influencing what other people think and feel about themselves. We use the term conative theory of mind (ToM) to refer to communicative interactions involving one person trying to influence the mental and emotional state of another, paradigmatic examples of which are irony and empathy. This study reports how children with traumatic brain injury (TBI) understand ironic criticism and empathic praise, on a task requiring them to identify speaker belief and intention for direct conative speech acts involving literal truth, and indirect speech acts involving either ironic criticism or empathic praise. Participants were 71 children in the chronic state of a single TBI and 57 age- and gender-matched children with orthopedic injuries (OI). Group differences emerged on indirect speech acts involving conation (i.e., irony and empathy), but not on structurally and linguistically identical direct speech acts, suggesting specific deficits in this aspect of social cognition in school-age children with TBI. Deficits in children with mild-moderate TBI were less widespread and more selective than those of children with more severe injuries. Deficits in understanding the social, conative function of indirect speech acts like irony and empathy have widespread and deep implications for social function in children with TBI.

Cognitive, affective, and conative theory of mind (ToM) in children with traumatic brain injury.

We studied three forms of dyadic communication involving theory of mind (ToM) in 82 children with traumatic brain injury (TBI) and 61 children with orthopedic injury (OI): Cognitive (concerned with false belief), Affective (concerned with expressing socially deceptive facial expressions), and Conative (concerned with influencing another's thoughts or feelings). We analyzed the pattern of brain lesions in the TBI group and conducted voxel-based morphometry for all participants in five large-scale functional brain networks, and related lesion and volumetric data to ToM outcomes. Children with TBI exhibited difficulty with Cognitive, Affective, and Conative ToM. The perturbation threshold for Cognitive ToM is higher than that for Affective and Conative ToM, in that Severe TBI disturbs Cognitive ToM but even Mild-Moderate TBI disrupt Affective and Conative ToM. Childhood TBI was associated with damage to all five large-scale brain networks. Lesions in the Mirror Neuron Empathy network predicted lower Conative ToM involving ironic criticism and empathic praise. Conative ToM was significantly and positively related to the package of Default Mode, Central Executive, and Mirror Neuron Empathy networks and, more specifically, to two hubs of the Default Mode Network, the posterior cingulate/retrosplenial cortex and the hippocampal formation, including entorhinal cortex and parahippocampal cortex.

Emotional expression and socially modulated emotive communication in children with traumatic brain injury.

Facial emotion expresses feelings, but is also a vehicle for social communication. Using five basic emotions (happiness, sadness, fear, disgust, and anger) in a comprehension paradigm, we studied how facial expression reflects inner feelings (emotional expression) but may be socially modulated to communicate a different emotion from the inner feeling (emotive communication, a form of affective theory of mind). Participants were 8- to 12-year-old children with TBI (n = 78) and peers with orthopedic injuries (n = 56). Children with mild-moderate or severe TBI performed more poorly than the OI group, and chose less cognitively sophisticated strategies for emotive communication. Compared to the OI and mild-moderate TBI groups, children with severe TBI had more deficits in anger, fear, and sadness; neutralized emotions less often; produced socially inappropriate responses; and failed to differentiate the core emotional dimension of arousal. Children with TBI have difficulty understanding the dual role of facial emotions in expressing feelings and communicating socially relevant but deceptive emotions, and these difficulties likely contribute to their social problems.

"I can read these colors." orthographic manipulations and the development of the color-word stroop.

The color-word Stroop is a popular measure in psychological assessments. Evidence suggests that Stroop performance relies heavily on reading, an ability that improves over childhood. One way to influence reading proficiency is by orthographic manipulations. To determine the degree of interference posed by orthographic manipulations with development, in addition to standard color-Words (purple) we manipulated letter-positions: First/last letter in correct place (prulpe) and Scrambled (ulrpep). We tested children 7-16 years (n = 128) and adults (n = 23). Analyses showed that Word- and First/last-incongruent were qualitatively similar, whereas Word-congruent was different than other conditions. Results suggest that for children and adults, performance was hindered the most for incongruent and incorrectly spelled words and was most facilitated when words were congruent with the ink color and correctly spelled. Implications on visual word recognition and reading are discussed.

Mathematical skills in 3- and 5-year-olds with spina bifida and their typically developing peers: a longitudinal approach.

Preschoolers with spina bifida (SB) were compared to typically developing (TD) children on tasks tapping mathematical knowledge at 36 months (n = 102) and 60 months of age (n = 98). The group with SB had difficulty compared to TD peers on all mathematical tasks except for transformation on quantities in the subitizable range. At 36 months, vocabulary knowledge, visual-spatial, and fine motor abilities predicted achievement on a measure of informal math knowledge in both groups. At 60 months of age, phonological awareness, visual-spatial ability, and fine motor skill were uniquely and differentially related to counting knowledge, oral counting, object-based arithmetic skills, and quantitative concepts. Importantly, the patterns of association between these predictors and mathematical performance were similar across the groups. A novel finding is that fine motor skill uniquely predicted object-based arithmetic abilities in both groups, suggesting developmental continuity in the neurocognitive correlates of early object-based and later symbolic arithmetic problem solving. Models combining 36-month mathematical ability and these language-based, visual-spatial, and fine motor abilities at 60 months accounted for considerable variance on 60-month informal mathematical outcomes. Results are discussed with reference to models of mathematical development and early identification of risk in preschoolers with neurodevelopmental disorder.

Executive functions underlying multiplicative reasoning: problem type matters.

We investigated the extent to which inhibition, updating, shifting, and mental-attentional capacity (M-capacity) contribute to children's ability to solve multiplication word problems. A total of 155 children in Grades 3-6 (8- to 13-year-olds) completed a set of multiplication word problems at two levels of difficulty: one-step and multiple-step problems. They also received a reading comprehension test and a battery of inhibition, updating, shifting, and M-capacity measures. Structural equation modeling showed that updating mediated the relationship between multiplication performance (controlling for reading comprehension score) and latent attentional factors M-capacity and inhibition. Updating played a more important role in predicting performance on multiple-step problems than did age, whereas age and updating were equally important predictors on one-step problems. Shifting was not a significant predictor in either model. Implications of proposing executive function updating as a mediator between mathematical cognition and chronological age and attention resources are discussed.

Theory of mind depends on domain-general executive functions of working memory and cognitive inhibition in children with traumatic brain injury.

Relations among theory of mind (ToM), the executive functions of working memory and cognitive inhibition, and frontal lesions were studied using path analysis in 43 school-aged children with traumatic brain injury. The relation between cognitive inhibition and ToM involved a single mediated path, such that cognitive inhibition predicted ToM through working memory. Frontal injury had a direct impact on working memory, which then separately determined ToM performance, the direct single paths between frontal injury and ToM being nonsignificant. The expression of ToM in school-age children with traumatic brain injury is not domain specific, but instead depends on the domain-general functions of working memory and cognitive inhibition.