Theory of mind abilities in old adults did not receive attention until Happé, Winner, and Brownell (1998) found that the theory of mind performance improved with advancing age. However, Maylor, Moulson, Muncer, and Taylor (2002) and Sullivan and Ruffman (2004) reported that the old adults performed worse than the young adults on theory of mind stories. We used “strange stories” (Happé et al., 1998; Maylor et al., 2002) and faux pas stories (Stone Baron-Cohen, Calder, Keane, & Young, 2003) separately to examine the theory of mind abilities of an old and a young group with IQ and educational level matched. We found that the performance of the old group was worse than that of the young group on the faux pas stories, especially in the faux pas understanding, but no significant difference existed between the two age groups in the strange stories understanding. Moreover, the performance on the faux pas and strange stories for both old and young adults was separately independent of fluid intelligence, full-scale IQ, verbal IQ, and performance IQ.

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Progressive methods of data evaluation based on recent artificial neural networks are introduced to the field of psychology in the current study. Artificial neural networks techniques work on different basis than the classical statistical methods. Particularly, the Kohonen’s Self-Organizing Map (SOM), the Modified Group Method of Data Handling (GMDH), and the recent Group of Adaptive Models Evolution (GAME) were used in this study for a self-organized clustering of the measured data and for an analysis of factor significance. Significance of seven various factors for facial expression decoding accuracy was assessed. Gender was considered to be the most significant factor for the correct recognition of facial expressions. Place of origin yielded the second highest significance. Results indicate women to be better decoders than men and persons growing up in urban areas to be better decoders than persons growing up in rural areas.

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The ontogenesis of social understanding has been linked with a range of cognitive skills involving executive functions and social factors like the child’s social interactions. This research was conducted in China in order to test recent claims that members of the child’s social network and parenting styles are instrumental in facilitating this development and that oriental children show advanced skills in executive functions and relatively slow ‘theory of mind’ development. Sixty-seven preschoolers performed executive and false tests and 64 of their parents returned questionnaires about the child’s social network and their disciplinary strategies. Individual social and cognitive factors predicted false belief but in regression analyses inhibitory control remained significant and one social predictor, interaction with cousins, was negatively related to social awareness. The data suggest the importance of analyses of the origins of social knowledge in diverse cultural settings and exploring the cognitive and social factors that underlie this development.

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Our previous study (Ito & Ikegami, in press) hypothesized and confirmed that people would predominantly draw corresponding mental state inference (i.e., inferring mental states correspondent with behaviors in terms of evaluative connotations) from undesirable behavior, whereas they draw not just correspondent but non-correspondent mental state inference as well for desirable behavior. That study, however, used hypothetical behavioral events. Our present study examined whether this asymmetrical inference is evident in the case of inference from real-life behavioral episodes. Participants were asked to remember desirable and undesirable behavior performed by other persons, and to infer the actors’ mental states from their behaviors. The results supported the hypothesis, indicating that, while people’s inclinations to infer correspondent mental states from both behaviors were potent, inference of non-correspondent mental states from desirable behaviors were more frequent than inference from undesirable behaviors. The results also provided insight into the process of idea generation in mental state inference.

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Two studies examined the effects of group inclusiveness and the strength of group identification on intergroup attributional bias. Thirty-seven Hakka students (Study 1) and 53 Chaoshanese students (Study 2) in China read scenarios in which members of an excessively inclusive in-group, optimally inclusive in-group, or an out-group engaged in desirable or undesirable behaviors. They then made causal attributions for each behavior. Results consistently showed that intergroup attributional bias (i.e., attributing desirable behaviors of in-group members to internal causes and undesirable behaviors to external causes; for events associated with members of out-groups, opposite directions of attributions are observed) was especially visible when the in-group size was optimally inclusive. Moreover, in-group identification with optimally inclusive in-group was stronger than that with excessively inclusive in-group. The strength of group-identification was positively correlated with the magnitude of intergroup attributional bias at the individual level. The results were interpreted from the viewpoint of Self-Categorization Theory.

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