Tsomokos, Dimitris I;
Flouri, Eirini;
(2023)
The role of social cognition in mental health trajectories from childhood to adolescence.
European Child & Adolescent Psychiatry
10.1007/s00787-023-02187-8.
(In press).
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Abstract
We investigated the association between an aspect of Theory of Mind in childhood, false-belief understanding, and trajectories of internalising (emotional and peer) and externalising (conduct and hyperactivity) problems in childhood and adolescence. The sample was 8408 children from the UK's Millennium Cohort Study, followed at ages 5, 7, 11, 14, and 17 years. Social cognitive abilities were measured at 5 and 7 years through a vignette version of the Sally-Anne task administered by an unfamiliar assessor in a socially demanding dyadic interaction. Internalising and externalising problems were measured via the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire at 7-17 years. Using latent growth modelling, and after controlling for sex, ethnicity, maternal education, verbal ability, and time-varying family income, we found that superior social cognitive abilities predicted a decrease in emotional problems over time. In sex-stratified analyses, they predicted decreasing conduct problem trajectories in females and lower levels of conduct problems at baseline in males.
| Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Title: | The role of social cognition in mental health trajectories from childhood to adolescence |
| Location: | Germany |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| DOI: | 10.1007/s00787-023-02187-8 |
| Publisher version: | https://doi.org/10.1007/s00787-023-02187-8 |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | © The Author(s) 2023. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). |
| Keywords: | Adolescence, False-belief attribution, Longitudinal study, Mental health, Social cognition, Social competence, Theory of mind |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Education UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Education > UCL Institute of Education UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Education > UCL Institute of Education > IOE - Psychology and Human Development |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10168018 |
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