Adults’ Theory of Infants’ Mind: A Comparison between Parents and Nonparents

Abstract

This study examined whether there were parental state differences in interpretations of infants’ behaviours as associated with some mental states. Parents, nonparent women, and nonparent men were shown video clips that displayed several infant behaviours (e.g., playing with his/her mother). Then they were given two tasks. In a rating task, participants were asked to rate the likelihood of the filmed infant to have a mental state. On the other hand, in a description task, participants were instructed to explicitly describe the filmed infants’ mental state in an open-ended manner. Importantly, all participants were asked to report the meaning of infants’ behaviour in specific acts from the same set of infants’ behaviours (e.g., the infants saw mother’s face and smiled). The results revealed that parents and nonparent women significantly higher rated that infants were likely to express a mental state in the rating task than nonparent men did. On the other hand, parents were more likely to describe the filmed infants’ mental states in the description task than nonparent women and nonparent men did. Results suggest that parents interpret more meanings from infants’ behaviours compared to nonparents, even when both parents and nonparents equally focused on infants’ behaviours.