Why Do Children Who Solve False Belief Tasks Begin to Find True Belief Control Tasks Difficult? A Test of Pragmatic Performance Factors in Theory of Mind Tasks

The litmus test for the development of a metarepresentational Theory of Mind is the false belief (FB) task in which children have to represent how another agent misrepresents the world. Children typically start mastering this task around age four. Recently, however, a puzzling finding has emerged: Once children master the FB task, they begin to fail true belief (TB) control tasks. Pragmatic accounts assume that the TB task is pragmatically confusing because it poses a trivial academic test question about a rational agent’s perspective; and we do not normally engage in such discourse about subjective mental perspectives unless there is at least the possibility of error or deviance. The lack of such an obvious possibility in the TB task implicates that there might be some hidden perspective difference and thus makes the task confusing. In the present study, we test the pragmatic account by administering to 3- to 6-year-olds (N = 88) TB and FB tasks and structurally analogous true and false sign (TS/FS) tasks. The belief and sign tasks are matched in terms of representational and metarepresentational complexity; the crucial difference is that TS tasks do not implicate an alternative non-mental perspective and should thus be less pragmatically confusing than TB tasks. The results show parallel and correlated development in FB and FS tasks, replicate the puzzling performance pattern in TB tasks, but show no trace of this in TS tasks. Taken together, these results speak in favor of the pragmatic performance account.

Mindfulness improves theory of mind in psychosis

Impaired Theory of Mind (ToM) ability is a core feature of psychotic disorders that challenges psychosis treatment. We aimed to explore the effect of a Mindfulness-Based Intervention (MBI) on ToM ability in a randomized clinical trial (RCT). A sample of 36 participants diagnosed with psychotic disorder were recruited from a community center and randomly allocated to Integrated Rehabilitation Treatment (IRT) or IRT+MBI. ToM skills were assessed through the Hinting Test and the Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test (RMET). IRT+MBI scored higher in RMET than IRT at posttreatment. MBI is a promising tool for improving ToM ability in psychosis.Keywords: psychotic disorders, theory of mind, mindfulness-based-interventions.

Archetype, Psyche, World

In our dialogues over the nature of archetypes, essence, psyche, and world, I further respond to Erik Goodwyn’s recent foray into establishing an ontological position that not only answers to the mind-body problem, but further locates the source of Psyche on a cosmic plane. His impressive attempt to launch a neo-Jungian metaphysics is based on the principle of cosmic panpsychism that bridges both the internal parameters of archetypal process and their emergence in consciousness and the external world conditioned by a psychic universe. Here I explore the ontology of experience, mind, matter, metaphysical realism, and critique Goodwyn’s turn to Neoplatonism. The result is a potentially compatible theory of mind and reality that grounds archetypal theory in onto-phenomenology, metaphysics, and bioscience, hence facilitating new directions in analytical psychology.