Teoria da mente e compreensão das emoções: um estudo comparativo com alunos do ensino fundamental

Abstract

The theory of mind, understanding children elaborate about the mind, including emotions, intentions, desires and creed, let it predict their behavior and formulate the understanding of the social world. The emotion understanding, one of the founding aspects of the theory of mind, also influences the social-cognitive knowledge and seems to be closely connected to the social development path and scholar adjustment. Such constatation make us question about how emotion understanding would be on children that shows differentiated behavior, like aggressive behavior. This research aimed to explore the relations between the theory of mind – specifically the emotion understanding – and the aggressive behavior. It also aimed the understanding of the relation between emotion understanding and aggressiveness in children in fundamental school using comparisons between children that shows signs of aggressive behavior and children that don't show such signs. One hundred fifteen children on their first grade at two Juiz de Fora's fundamental school, both male and female, took part on the study. Among this initial sample, a subgroup of 60 children was selected – 30 students were identified by their teachers as socially suitable and 30 students were identified with aggressive behavior signs by the Escala de Percepção por Professores dos Comportamentos Agressivos de Criança na Escola. Children of both groups were evaluated regarding their development of the theory of mind, by the Scaling of Theory of Mind Tasks, and regarding their emotion understanding by the Teste de Inteligência Emocional para Crianças. The results showed a relation between the theory of mind and social development and pointed the influence of the emotion understanding ability level for the infant social-emotional adjustment. A significant statistical difference between the two groups regarding to the theory of mind was verified on the task of Knowledge Access and the Scale's final general score – regarding the emotional comprehension – on the sub-component Compreensão e Análise das Emoções. On a general level, children identified as non-aggressive tended to show the theory of the mind and emotional comprehension more accurate than children with signs of aggressive behavior when they were compared.