Essay --

This article by Shakoor et. al, (2011) is a longitudinal study of children’s theory of mind and adolescent involvement in bullying. Theory of mind (ToM) is a prediction of everyday behaviors based on a person’s mental state. Understanding of false beliefs is a Core ToM, which has usually developed by age 4. By age 7 more advanced skills develop including embedded mental states (‘what he thinks what she thinks’) and understanding that emotions can influence other people’s beliefs. Developing these skills are important for shaping healthy social interactions and can be important with decoding social cues as well as being able to adjust behaviors. Therefore, those that are delayed in developing ToM could be exposed to social interactions that are negative; because of this they may find it difficult to establish good relationships during their life (Shakoor et al., 2011, p. 254). The major research of this study was whether or not children who were involved in bullying during adolescence had poor ToM in childhood. The theory being tested was that poor childhood ToM can cause bullying during early adolescence. Bullying effects on average 27% of adolescents and children every year. This is a negative social experience that happens worldwide. Children who do not have good ToM are at a greater risk to become involved in bullying situations. This is because ToM skills support social interactions. Children with poor ToM do not have a good understanding of the emotions and intentions of other people. This puts at risk the children’s ability to perceive social signals that reveal nonreciprocal interactions, which puts the child at risk of being subjugated or victimized. Poor ToM can also affect children’s ability to be able to stand up for th... ...ying, they just took the word of the teachers and the mother. Also if the children hang out with kids at school who are bullies that would influence them to be bullies as well regardless of ToM. I found that the conclusion of the article made sense based on the data of the study. The conclusion stated what should be done to help prevent bullying and listed some training strategies to help improve children’s ToM. The authors named all the limitations that I can think of. The main one being that the study does not generalize to all children because the data only came from twins. For future research studies they can compare the data collected from the twins with data collected from children who are not twins. Also they can collect data on what type of bullying was taking place with each child whether it was relational or physical (Shakoor et al., 2011, p. 259 & 260).