Journal
APPLIED NEUROPSYCHOLOGY-CHILD
Volume 11, Issue 3, Pages 471-479Publisher
ROUTLEDGE JOURNALS, TAYLOR & FRANCIS LTD
DOI: 10.1080/21622965.2021.1892494
Keywords
Home environment; preschoolers; responsiveness; theory of mind
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Funding
- CNPq-National Council for Scientific and Technological Development for the CNPq
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This study aimed to investigate the relationship between family environment characteristics and Theory of Mind (ToM) performance in Brazilian children aged 3 to 5. Findings indicated a consistent positive correlation between family environment responsiveness and ToM performance, with individual and contextual factors explaining 28.4% of ToM variance.
Given the importance of the environment for the development of the theory of mind (ToM) in childhood, as well as the scarcity of studies in low-income Latin American countries, we aimed to investigate the relation between family environment characteristics and performance in ToM tasks in a group of Brazilian children. A total of 49 children participated, whose ages ranged between 3 and 5 years (M = 4.43; SD = 0.71), all of whom attended a public kindergarten school located in the metropolitan region of Sao Paulo, Brazil, and took the Theory of mind test for children (TMTC). The observation of the characteristics of the family environment was conducted by using the Home Observation for Measurement of the Environment (HOME) instrument in the very home setting of each participating child. By controlling the effects of children's age, intelligence, vocabulary, and mother's and father's educational level, a consistent positive, significant, and low-magnitude correlation was found between HOME's Responsiveness subscale with the total score in TMTC. A robust regression analysis also showed that individual and contextual variables (above cited, plus sex) and Responsiveness accounted for 28.4% of ToM variance. This study corroborates previous findings on the relation between family aspects and ToM, specifically highlighting parents' responsiveness.
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