Search results for "theory of Mind"

2019

Trust is a critical issue in human–robot interactions: as robotic systems gain complexity, it becomes crucial for them to be able to blend into our society by maximizing their acceptability and reliability. Various studies have examined how trust is attributed by people to robots, but fewer have investigated the opposite scenario, where a robot is the trustor and a human is the trustee. The ability for an agent to evaluate the trustworthiness of its sources of information is particularly useful in joint task situations where people and robots must collaborate to reach shared goals. We propose an artificial cognitive architecture based on the developmental robotics paradigm that can estimate…

Longitudinal evidence for an emotion-action lag on desire: The role of emotional understanding

2021

Abstract Many previous studies have found that children understand much earlier what a character who has a false belief will do than what a character will feel. This gap between the understanding of action and emotion is known as the belief-emotion lag and to this day there is no convincing explanation as to why it happens. There are also no studies that have explored whether this same gap occurs in the understanding of desire. This longitudinal study had a twofold objective: to explore the existence of a lag between the prediction of action and emotion based on desire, and to search for the role that specific emotions could have in children’s answers. To this end, we administered the Test …

Social and motivational functioning is not critically dependent on feedback of autonomic responses: neuropsychological evidence from patients with pu…

2004

Social, emotional and motivational behaviours are associated with production of automatic bodily responses. Re-representation in the brain through feedback of autonomic and skeletomuscular arousal is proposed to underlie "feeling states". These influence emotional judgments and bias motivational decision-making and guide social interactions. Consistent with this hypothesis, dissocial behaviour and deficits on emotional and motivation tasks are associated with blunted bodily responses in patients with orbitofrontal brain lesions or developmental psychopathy. To determine the critical dependence of social and emotional behaviours on bodily responses mediated by the autonomic nervous system, w…

Theory of Mind Profiles in Children With Autism Spectrum Disorder: Adaptive/Social Skills and Pragmatic Competence

2020

Theory of Mind (ToM) is one of the most relevant concepts in the field of social cognition, particularly in the case of Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD). Literature showing that individuals with ASD display deficits in ToM is extensive and robust. However, some related issues deserve more research: the heterogeneous profile of ToM abilities in children with ASD and the association between different levels of ToM development and social, pragmatic, and adaptive behaviors in everyday life. The first objective of this study was to identify profiles of children with ASD without intellectual disability (ID), based on explicit and applied ToM knowledge, and compare these profiles with a group of ch…

The impact of attachment distress on affect-centered mentalization: An experimental study in psychosomatic patients and healthy adults

2018

Introduction We investigated the impact of attachment distress on affect-centered mentalization in a clinical and a non-clinical sample, comparing mentalization in a baseline condition to mentalization under a condition of attachment distress. Methods The sample consisted of 127 adults who underwent inpatient psychosomatic treatment, and 34 mentally healthy adults. Affect-centered mentalization was assessed by analyzing participants’ narratives on interpersonal situations in a baseline condition with the Levels of Emotional Awareness Scale (LEAS), and an experimental condition inducing attachment distress with the Adult Attachment Projective Picture System (AAP). Unlike the LEAS, the AAP is…

Imaginary companions, theory of mind and emotion understanding in young children

2014

ABSTRACTThe phenomenon of imaginary companions (ICs) has received little attention in developmental psychology, even though it can be observed in approximately 25% of preschool-aged children. Only a few studies have investigated the effect of ICs on children's theory of mind and emotion understanding, and the results are partial or inconsistent. This study used comprehensive measures to assess emotional understanding and theory of mind in children aged four to six with ICs (N = 24) and compared their performance to that of children without ICs (N = 24). Results showed that children with ICs, regardless of age and gender, have a better theory of mind and emotion understanding than children w…

The role of linguistic and cognitive factors in emotion recognition difficulties in children with ASD, ADHD or DLD.

2018

Background Many children with neurodevelopmental disorders such as autism spectrum disorder (ASD), attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) or developmental language disorder (DLD) have difficulty recognizing and understanding emotions. However, the reasons for these difficulties are currently not well understood. Aims To compare the emotion recognition skills of children with neurodevelopmental disorders as well as those children's skills with the skills of their typically developing (TD) age peers. Also, to identify the role of underlying factors in predicting emotion recognition skills. Methods & procedures The 6-10-year-old children (n = 50) who participated in the study had eith…

Pragmatic competence of children with autism spectrum disorder. Impact of theory of mind, verbal working memory, ADHD symptoms, and structural langua…

2017

The primary aim of this study is to increase the existing knowledge about the pragmatic skills of children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD). Specifically, the study has two objectives. The first is to provide a profile of characteristics based on The Children's Communication Checklist (CCC-2) pragmatics scales (inappropriate initiation, stereotyped language, use of context, nonverbal communication, and general pragmatics) and narrative task indicators. To this end, children with ASD will be compared to children with typical development (TD), controlling the effects of sex and structural language (speech, syntax, semantics, coherence). The second objective is to analyze whether theory of…

The longitudinal interplay of emotion understanding, theory of mind, and language in the preschool years

2019

Emotion comprehension (EC), theory of mind (ToM), and language are particularly important aspects of child development. In recent years, there has been increasing interest in understanding how these three variables are related to preschool children. However, results have been contradictory, and it is not clear how EC, ToM, and language are associated. The aim of this study was to analyze the relationships among EC, ToM, and language through a longitudinal study. Participants were 105 children (49 girls and 56 boys). EC, ToM, and language skills were assessed when children were 3, 4, and 5 years old. The cross-lagged model confirmed that EC preceded ToM in time. The half-longitudinal model …

Would a robot trust you? Developmental robotics model of trust and theory of mind

2019

Trust is a critical issue in human - robot interactions: as robotic systems gain complexity, it becomes crucial for them to be able to blend into our society by maximizing their acceptability and reliability. Various studies have examined how trust is attributed by people to robots, but fewer have investigated the opposite scenario, where a robot is the trustor and a human is the trustee. The ability for an agent to evaluate the trustworthiness of its sources of information is particularly useful in joint task situations where people and robots must collaborate to reach shared goals. We propose an artificial cognitive architecture based on the developmental robotics paradigm that can estima…