Beaudoin Cindy, Leblanc Élizabel, Gagner Charlotte, Beauchamp Miriam H
Department of Psychology, University of Montreal, Montreal, QC, Canada.
Sainte-Justine Hospital Research Center, Montreal, QC, Canada.
Front Psychol. 2020 Jan 15;10:2905. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2019.02905. eCollection 2019.
Theory of mind (TOM), the ability to infer mental states to self and others, has been a pervasive research theme across many disciplines including developmental, educational, neuro-, and social psychology, social neuroscience and speech therapy. TOM abilities have been consistently linked to markers of social adaptation and have been shown to be affected in a broad range of clinical conditions. Despite the wealth and breadth of research dedicated to TOM, identifying appropriate assessment tools for young children remains challenging. This systematic review presents an inventory of TOM measures for children aged 0-5 years and provides details on their content and characteristics. Electronic databases (1983-2019) and 9 test publisher catalogs were systematically reviewed. In total, 220 measures, identified within 830 studies, were found to assess the understanding of seven categories of mental states and social situations: emotions, desires, intentions, percepts, knowledge, beliefs and mentalistic understanding of non-literal communication, and pertained to 39 types of TOM sub-abilities. Information on the measures' mode of presentation, number of items, scoring options, and target populations were extracted, and psychometric details are listed in summary tables. The results of the systematic review are summarized in a visual framework "Abilities in Theory of Mind Space" (ATOMS) which provides a new taxonomy of TOM sub-domains. This review highlights the remarkable variety of measures that have been created to assess TOM, but also the numerous methodological and psychometric challenges associated with developing and choosing appropriate measures, including issues related to the limited range of sub-abilities targeted, lack of standardization across studies and paucity of psychometric information provided.
心理理论(TOM),即推断自己和他人心理状态的能力,一直是包括发展心理学、教育心理学、神经心理学、社会心理学、社会神经科学和言语治疗在内的许多学科中普遍存在的研究主题。TOM能力一直与社会适应指标相关联,并已被证明在广泛的临床情况下会受到影响。尽管针对TOM的研究丰富多样,但为幼儿确定合适的评估工具仍然具有挑战性。本系统综述列出了0至5岁儿童TOM测量工具清单,并详细介绍了其内容和特点。我们系统地检索了电子数据库(1983 - 2019年)和9个测试出版商目录。总共在830项研究中确定了220种测量工具,这些工具用于评估对七类心理状态和社会情境的理解:情绪、欲望、意图、感知、知识、信念以及对非字面交流的心理理解,涉及39种TOM子能力类型。提取了有关测量工具的呈现方式、项目数量、评分选项和目标人群的信息,并将心理测量学细节列在汇总表中。系统综述的结果总结在一个可视化框架“心理理论空间能力”(ATOMS)中,该框架提供了TOM子领域的新分类法。本综述强调了为评估TOM而创建的测量工具种类繁多,但也突出了与开发和选择合适测量工具相关的众多方法学和心理测量学挑战,包括与目标子能力范围有限、研究缺乏标准化以及提供的心理测量学信息匮乏相关的问题。