Development of representational theory of mind: Concepts of mental states, awareness of thinking, and self-permanence.

In a recent monograph, my students, colleagues, and I reported on a comprehensive set of tests of the theory of Perceptual Access Reasoning (PAR), a new theory of the development of representational theory of mind (ToM). The central tenet of the theory is that young children acquire a hitherto undetected non-representational ToM (i.e.

Perceptual Access Reasoning (PAR) in Developing a Representational Theory of Mind.

An important part of children's social and cognitive development is their understanding that people are psychological beings with internal, mental states including desire, intention, perception, and belief. A full understanding of people as psychological beings requires a representational theory of mind (ToM), which is an understanding that mental states can faithfully represent reality, or misrepresent reality. For the last 35 years, researchers have relied on false-belief tasks as the gold standard to test children's understanding that beliefs can misrepresent reality.

The unique effects of maternal and paternal depressive symptoms on youth's symptomatology: Moderation by family ethnicity, family structure, and child gender.

Drawing on five waves of longitudinal data from 392 families (52% female; mean age of wave 1 [Mage_W1] = 12.89, standard deviation [SD] = .48; Mage_W5 = 21.

Data Harmonization: Establishing Measurement Invariance across Different Assessments of the Same Construct across Adolescence.

Longitudinal measurement invariance is a major concern for developmental scholars who seek to evaluate the same underlying construct across time. Unfortunately, discontinuities in the expression of various psychological constructs, as well as essential changes in measurement that are necessitated by shifting developmental capacities and practice effects over time, make the task of establishing longitudinal invariance extremely difficult. Drawing on 5 waves of longitudinal data from 392 families (52% female;  = 12.

Reciprocal Relations between Emerging Adults' Representations of Relationships with Mothers, Fathers, and Romantic Partners.

This study employed a fully cross-lagged, longitudinal model to examine reciprocal relations between representations of relationships with parents and romantic partners at ages 20 and 22. Representations were assessed with continuous measures of dismissing/avoidant and preoccupied relationship styles across the attachment and affiliation systems for parents, and across the attachment, affiliation, and caregiving systems for romantic partners. Earlier relationships with both mothers and fathers independently predicted changes in later views of romantic relationships, and earlier romantic relationships predicted changes in later views of relationships with both mothers and fathers.