Virginia Slaughter
Biographic Data
| ID | 79055 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Virginia Slaughter |
| GIVEN NAMES | Virginia |
| FAMILY NAME | Slaughter |
| SIGNATURE | SLAUGHTER V |
| AFFILIATIONS | The University of Queensland |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-9315-1497 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 34 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 102 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 34 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2000 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
From a crisis management tool to proactive death education in Swedish preschools
This study is part of a larger project with the general aim of developing the ability of preschool practitioners to reflect critically on their practice related to children's grief and questions about death. The article is based on six focus-group interviews and a workshop during which preschool practitioners reflected on and worked with a national crisis management tool: the crisis box. Through the theory of didactic transposition the analysis s…
From Dolls to Trucks: Factors Associated With Adults' Gender‐Typing of Children's Toys
Children's gender socialisation begins from a young age and one socialisation context used to provide gender‐based information is toy play. Adults play a key role in prescribing children's toys; however, the factors that motivate adults to consider toys as gender‐typed for boys or girls require further investigation. We investigated predictors of gender‐typing of children's toys by women and men, both parents and non‐parents. In this study, 1200 …
A Review and Critique of Studies Examining Empathy in Infants
We review studies examining empathy (empathic concern) in infants and children. The traditional claim is that empathy developed over the second year of life such that by 18–24 months, children were often showing signs of empathy and that empathy is enabled by children’s developing sense of self. However, over the past 25 years, researchers have often concluded that infants under 1 year of age are empathic and that signs of self-understanding are …
Using a Continuous Measure of Child Gender Identity to Explore Mother–Child Agreement
Children's gender identity is typically assessed using binary, categorical measures, limiting the ability to capture individual differences or diversity. The Gender Spectrum Task offers a continuous, developmentally appropriate single‐item measure for assessing children's gender identity from 3years of age. This study extends its use to a dyadic format by examining mother‐child alignment on the measure. Australian mother‐child dyads ( N = 107; ch…
Living in heaven and buried in the earth? Teaching young children about death
This qualitative study focuses on preschool practitioners’ teaching about death. The theoretical framework draws on ideas about dialogic teaching and the concepts that are of importance for understanding what biological death entails. The study was conducted within a qualitative, participant centered paradigm. The data consist of video recordings of four visits to cemeteries conducted by 6 practitioners and 26 children (three-five years old) from…
How We Talk to Kids: Adults Prefer Different Forms of Language for Children Based on Gender Expression
Mindreading across cultural boundaries
A meta-analytic review on the social–emotional intelligence correlates of the six bullying roles: Bullies, followers, victims, bully-victims, defenders, and outsiders
Does Neonatal Imitation Exist? Insights From a Meta-Analysis of 336 Effect Sizes
Neonatal imitation is a cornerstone in many theoretical accounts of human development and social behavior, yet its existence has been debated for the past 40 years. To examine possible explanations for the inconsistent findings in this body of research, we conducted a multilevel meta-analysis synthesizing 336 effect sizes from 33 independent samples of human newborns, reported in 26 articles. The meta-analysis found significant evidence for neona…
Theory of Mind (ToM) Development in Thai Deaf Children
This study explored theory of mind (ToM) development in school-aged deaf children. To address new questions, we gave a standard, well-controlled false-belief test to a large (n = 200) sample of severely-to-profoundly deaf children aged 8–15 years in a non-Western culture (Thailand). There were 190 deaf children of hearing parents and 10 deaf native signers with signing deaf parents, consistent with overall population ratios. Comparing our Thai sa…
The Capricious Nature of Theory of Mind: Does Mental State Understanding Depend on the Characteristics of the Target
Using a between-groups design and random assignment, this study examined 214 Turkish children's (M = 11.66 years) mindreading and general reasoning about in-group members (Turks), similar out-group members (Syrians within Turkey) and dissimilar out-group members (Northern Europeans). Children heard four mindreading and four general reasoning stories with in-group or out-group members as targets. Whereas children's general reasoning about three gr…
In Two Minds: Similarity, Threat, and Prejudice Contribute to Worse Mindreading of Outgroups Compared With an Ingroup
We examined Turkish participants' mindreading accuracy toward ingroup versus outgroup targets. Three hundred and fifty-four Turkish participants were randomly assigned to one of three target groups: Turkish, Syrian, or Norwegian. The mindreading accuracy for these targets was measured along with the perceived cultural similarity of the target to the ingroup, as well as prejudice and threat perception. Participants evidenced higher mindreading acc…
Nimble negotiators: How theory of mind (ToM) interconnects with persuasion skills in children with and without ToM delay
Persuasion is an essential social skill. Yet its development and underpinnings are poorly understood. In 2 studies, a total of 167 children aged 3 to 12 years took theory of mind (ToM) tests and participated in unscripted, seminaturalistic persuasive conversations. Children were typically developing (TD) or had deafness or autism spectrum disorder (ASD). High-level, informationally rich persuasive arguments increased with age in all groups in bot…
Which button will I press? Preference for correctly ordered counting sequences in 18-month-olds
Correct counting respects the stable order principle whereby the count terms are recited in a fixed order every time. The 4 experiments reported here tested whether precounting infants recognize and prefer correct stable-ordered counting. The authors introduced a novel preference paradigm in which infants could freely press two buttons to activate videos of counting events. In the "correct" counting video, number words were always recited in the …
Culture, Parenting, and Children's Theory of Mind Development in Indonesia
Children's theory of mind (ToM) unfolds reliably through a sequence of conceptual milestones including, but not limited to, false belief. Sequences vary with culture, one observed previously in Western cultures (Australia, the United States) and another in two non-Western cultures, China and Iran. Two explanations for cross-cultural sequence differences have been suggested: (a) collectivism versus individualism or (b) authoritarian versus authori…
Neonatal Imitation
Theory of mind and prosocial behavior in childhood: A meta-analytic review
It has been argued that children who possess an advanced theory of mind (ToM) are more likely to act prosocially, yet the empirical findings are mixed. To address this issue definitively, a meta-analytic integration of all prior literature that met appropriate inclusion criteria was conducted. In total, 76 studies including 6,432 children between 2 and 12 years of age contributed to these analyses. Collapsed across all studies, a significant asso…
Peer social skills and theory of mind in children with autism, deafness, or typical development
Consequences of theory of mind (ToM) development for daily social lives of children are uncertain. Five to 13-year-olds (N = 195) with typical development, autism, or deafness (both native and late signers) took ToM tests and their teachers reported on their social skills for peer interaction (e.g., leadership, group entry). Groups differed in both ToM understanding (with late-signing deaf children especially delayed even relative to autistic chi…
Meta-Analysis of Theory of Mind and Peer Popularity in the Preschool and Early School Years
It has been argued that children who possess an advanced theory of mind (ToM) are viewed positively by their peers, but the empirical findings are mixed. This meta-analysis of 20 studies including 2,096 children (aged from 2 years, 8 months to 10 years) revealed a significant overall association (r = .19) indicating that children with higher ToM scores were also more popular in their peer group. The effect did not vary with age. The effect was we…
Talking theory of mind talk: Young school-aged children's everyday conversation and understanding of mind and emotion
Links between young children's everyday use of mindful conversational skills and their success on laboratory tests of theory of mind understanding (ToM) were evaluated. Using published scales, teachers rated the conversational behavior and shyness of 129 children aged 60 to 101 months (M = 78·8 months) who were in their first years of primary school. The children also took batteries of first- and second-order false-belief tests along with tests o…
Knowledge and Belief Understanding Among Iranian and Australian Preschool Children
For more than three decades, considerable research effort has been expended in documenting children's development of a theory of mind (ToM), or the recognition that behavior is determined by mental states. Studies comparing ToM development in children from Western and non-Western countries have shown differences in patterns of development in various ToM tasks. Specifically, Iranian children are slower than their Australian counterparts to acknowl…
Iranian Mothers' Disciplinary Strategies and Theory of Mind in Children: A Focus on Belief Understanding
Developing an understanding of others' minds (called theory of mind) has been a topic of considerable research effort. Literature on theory of mind and family influences within Western cultures has documented that children's understanding of mind is related to parental and family factors such as the number of siblings, discussion about emotions inside the family, and parenting styles. However, research in non-Western cultures is scarce, despite c…
Cultural and Family Influences on Children's Theory of Mind Development: A Comparison of Australian and Iranian School-Age Children
Over the past three decades, considerable research effort has been expended charting how and when children develop an understanding of others' minds. Multicultural studies allow us to determine what features of this important cognitive developmental achievement might be universal and what aspects are culturally specific. However, the body of literature in this area is slim and unsystematic. The current study therefore aimed to contrast and compar…
I can talk you into it: Theory of mind and persuasion behavior in young children
We investigated links between persuasive behavior and theory of mind (ToM) understanding using a novel naturalistic peer persuasion task in which children were invited to convince an interactive puppet to eat raw broccoli or brush his teeth. Sixty-three 3- to 8-year-olds (M age = 6 years, 6 months) took part in the persuasion task and were also given a battery of first-order and advanced false belief tests. As predicted, the number of independent…
Effects of Animal-Assisted Activities with Guinea Pigs in the Primary School Classroom
This study investigated the effects of a classroom-based animal-assisted activities (AAA) program with guinea pigs on the social functioning of primary school children. We hypothesized that participants in the experimental condition (n = 64), compared with a waitlist control group (n = 64), would demonstrate improvements in social functioning following the program. Parents and teachers used the Social Skills Rating System (SSRS) to evaluate the s…
Culture and the sequence of steps in theory of mind development
To examine cultural contrasts in the ordered sequence of conceptual developments leading to theory of mind (ToM), we compared 135 3- to 6-year-olds (77 Australians; 58 Iranians) on an established 5-step ToM scale (Wellman & Liu, 2004). There was a cross-cultural difference in the sequencing of ToM steps but not in overall rates of ToM mastery. In line with our predictions, the children from Iran conformed to a distinctive sequence previously obse…
Young children's understanding of death
There is a long history of research on children's understanding of death. This article briefly reviews psychoanalytic and Piagetian literature on children's death concepts, then focuses on recent research in developmental psychology that examines children's understanding of death in the context of their developing folk theory of biology. This new research demonstrates that children first conceptualise death as a biological event around age 5 or 6…
Effects of Animal-Assisted Activities with Guinea Pigs in the Primary School Classroom
This study investigated the effects of a classroom-based animal-assisted activities (AAA) program with guinea pigs on the social functioning of primary school children. We hypothesized that participants in the experimental condition (n = 64), compared with a waitlist control group (n = 64), would demonstrate improvements in social functioning following the program. Parents and teachers used the Social Skills Rating System (SSRS) to evaluate the s…
Development of ideas about food and nutrition from preschool to university
Peer social skills and theory of mind in children with autism, deafness, or typical development
Consequences of theory of mind (ToM) development for daily social lives of children are uncertain. Five to 13-year-olds (N = 195) with typical development, autism, or deafness (both native and late signers) took ToM tests and their teachers reported on their social skills for peer interaction (e.g., leadership, group entry). Groups differed in both ToM understanding (with late-signing deaf children especially delayed even relative to autistic chi…
Iranian Mothers' Disciplinary Strategies and Theory of Mind in Children: A Focus on Belief Understanding
Developing an understanding of others' minds (called theory of mind) has been a topic of considerable research effort. Literature on theory of mind and family influences within Western cultures has documented that children's understanding of mind is related to parental and family factors such as the number of siblings, discussion about emotions inside the family, and parenting styles. However, research in non-Western cultures is scarce, despite c…
I can talk you into it: Theory of mind and persuasion behavior in young children
We investigated links between persuasive behavior and theory of mind (ToM) understanding using a novel naturalistic peer persuasion task in which children were invited to convince an interactive puppet to eat raw broccoli or brush his teeth. Sixty-three 3- to 8-year-olds (M age = 6 years, 6 months) took part in the persuasion task and were also given a battery of first-order and advanced false belief tests. As predicted, the number of independent…
Cultural and Family Influences on Children's Theory of Mind Development: A Comparison of Australian and Iranian School-Age Children
Over the past three decades, considerable research effort has been expended charting how and when children develop an understanding of others' minds. Multicultural studies allow us to determine what features of this important cognitive developmental achievement might be universal and what aspects are culturally specific. However, the body of literature in this area is slim and unsystematic. The current study therefore aimed to contrast and compar…
Culture, Parenting, and Children's Theory of Mind Development in Indonesia
Children's theory of mind (ToM) unfolds reliably through a sequence of conceptual milestones including, but not limited to, false belief. Sequences vary with culture, one observed previously in Western cultures (Australia, the United States) and another in two non-Western cultures, China and Iran. Two explanations for cross-cultural sequence differences have been suggested: (a) collectivism versus individualism or (b) authoritarian versus authori…
In Two Minds: Similarity, Threat, and Prejudice Contribute to Worse Mindreading of Outgroups Compared With an Ingroup
We examined Turkish participants' mindreading accuracy toward ingroup versus outgroup targets. Three hundred and fifty-four Turkish participants were randomly assigned to one of three target groups: Turkish, Syrian, or Norwegian. The mindreading accuracy for these targets was measured along with the perceived cultural similarity of the target to the ingroup, as well as prejudice and threat perception. Participants evidenced higher mindreading acc…
The development of preferences for specific body shapes
Research with adults has shown a preference for average-weight female figures with waist-to-hip ratios (WHR) of 0.7, and average weight male figures with waist-to-hip ratios of 0.9. This study investigated the development of preferences for WHR sizes as well as preferences for specific body weights. Five-hundred eleven children ranging in age from 6 to 17 were presented with drawings of 12 male and 12 female silhouettes varying in weight and WHR …
Nimble negotiators: How theory of mind (ToM) interconnects with persuasion skills in children with and without ToM delay
Persuasion is an essential social skill. Yet its development and underpinnings are poorly understood. In 2 studies, a total of 167 children aged 3 to 12 years took theory of mind (ToM) tests and participated in unscripted, seminaturalistic persuasive conversations. Children were typically developing (TD) or had deafness or autism spectrum disorder (ASD). High-level, informationally rich persuasive arguments increased with age in all groups in bot…
How We Talk to Kids: Adults Prefer Different Forms of Language for Children Based on Gender Expression
Development of Reasoning and the Tension between Scientific and Conversational Inference
We report two studies designed to examine the role of conversational understanding in young children’s scientific reasoning. The results indicate that performance can be influenced by the degree of specificity in questioning. Under nonspecific questioning, accurate reasoning was associated with both vocabulary comprehension and pragmatic ability whereas under specific questioning it was associated only with vocabulary comprehension. Findings are …
Decalage in Infants' Search for Mothers Versus Toys Demonstrated With a Delayed Response Task
Thirty‐one infants, 7 to 14 months of age, were tested on object and mother permanence using a delayed response task (Diamond, 1985), in which a delay period is enforced before infants are allowed to search for hidden objects. Infants were tested in 2 separate conditions in which they searched for their mothers and a large toy, both of which were hidden under curtained tables. The delay period before search was allowed was incremented after each …
The development of preferences for specific body shapes
Research with adults has shown a preference for average-weight female figures with waist-to-hip ratios (WHR) of 0.7, and average weight male figures with waist-to-hip ratios of 0.9. This study investigated the development of preferences for WHR sizes as well as preferences for specific body weights. Five-hundred eleven children ranging in age from 6 to 17 were presented with drawings of 12 male and 12 female silhouettes varying in weight and WHR …
Young children's understanding of death
There is a long history of research on children's understanding of death. This article briefly reviews psychoanalytic and Piagetian literature on children's death concepts, then focuses on recent research in developmental psychology that examines children's understanding of death in the context of their developing folk theory of biology. This new research demonstrates that children first conceptualise death as a biological event around age 5 or 6…
Interacting Socially With Human Hands at 24 Months of Age
This experiment explored whether or not 2‐year‐olds would engage in synchronic imitation with human hands. Sixty‐four 24‐month‐old infants participated. In a test of synchronic imitation, infants were given a toy while a model simultaneously performed novel actions on an identical toy. Infants were randomly assigned to 1 of 4 model conditions: a familiar person, an unfamiliar person, disembodied human hands, and disembodied robotic pincers. Infan…
Maternal Talk About Mental States and the Emergence of Joint Visual Attention
Twenty‐four infants were tested monthly for gaze and point following between 9 and 15 months of age and mother‐infant free play sessions were also conducted at 9, 12, and 15 months (Carpenter, Nagell, & Tomasello, 1998). Using this data set, this study explored relations between maternal talk about mental states during mothers' free play with their infants and the emergence of joint visual attention in infants. Contrary to hypothesis, mothers' co…
Maternal mental state talk and infants' early gestural communication
Twenty-four infants were tested monthly for the production of imperative and declarative gestures between 0 ; 9 and 1 ; 3 and concurrent mother–infant free-play sessions were conducted at 0 ; 9, 1 ; 0 and 1 ; 3 (Carpenter, Nagell & Tomasello, 1998). Free-play transcripts were subsequently coded for maternal talk about mental states. Results revealed that the earlier infants produced imperative gestures, the more frequently their mothers made refe…
Development of ideas about food and nutrition from preschool to university
Culture and the sequence of steps in theory of mind development
To examine cultural contrasts in the ordered sequence of conceptual developments leading to theory of mind (ToM), we compared 135 3- to 6-year-olds (77 Australians; 58 Iranians) on an established 5-step ToM scale (Wellman & Liu, 2004). There was a cross-cultural difference in the sequencing of ToM steps but not in overall rates of ToM mastery. In line with our predictions, the children from Iran conformed to a distinctive sequence previously obse…
I can talk you into it: Theory of mind and persuasion behavior in young children
We investigated links between persuasive behavior and theory of mind (ToM) understanding using a novel naturalistic peer persuasion task in which children were invited to convince an interactive puppet to eat raw broccoli or brush his teeth. Sixty-three 3- to 8-year-olds (M age = 6 years, 6 months) took part in the persuasion task and were also given a battery of first-order and advanced false belief tests. As predicted, the number of independent…
Effects of Animal-Assisted Activities with Guinea Pigs in the Primary School Classroom
This study investigated the effects of a classroom-based animal-assisted activities (AAA) program with guinea pigs on the social functioning of primary school children. We hypothesized that participants in the experimental condition (n = 64), compared with a waitlist control group (n = 64), would demonstrate improvements in social functioning following the program. Parents and teachers used the Social Skills Rating System (SSRS) to evaluate the s…
Talking theory of mind talk: Young school-aged children's everyday conversation and understanding of mind and emotion
Links between young children's everyday use of mindful conversational skills and their success on laboratory tests of theory of mind understanding (ToM) were evaluated. Using published scales, teachers rated the conversational behavior and shyness of 129 children aged 60 to 101 months (M = 78·8 months) who were in their first years of primary school. The children also took batteries of first- and second-order false-belief tests along with tests o…
Knowledge and Belief Understanding Among Iranian and Australian Preschool Children
For more than three decades, considerable research effort has been expended in documenting children's development of a theory of mind (ToM), or the recognition that behavior is determined by mental states. Studies comparing ToM development in children from Western and non-Western countries have shown differences in patterns of development in various ToM tasks. Specifically, Iranian children are slower than their Australian counterparts to acknowl…
Iranian Mothers' Disciplinary Strategies and Theory of Mind in Children: A Focus on Belief Understanding
Developing an understanding of others' minds (called theory of mind) has been a topic of considerable research effort. Literature on theory of mind and family influences within Western cultures has documented that children's understanding of mind is related to parental and family factors such as the number of siblings, discussion about emotions inside the family, and parenting styles. However, research in non-Western cultures is scarce, despite c…
Cultural and Family Influences on Children's Theory of Mind Development: A Comparison of Australian and Iranian School-Age Children
Over the past three decades, considerable research effort has been expended charting how and when children develop an understanding of others' minds. Multicultural studies allow us to determine what features of this important cognitive developmental achievement might be universal and what aspects are culturally specific. However, the body of literature in this area is slim and unsystematic. The current study therefore aimed to contrast and compar…
Meta-Analysis of Theory of Mind and Peer Popularity in the Preschool and Early School Years
It has been argued that children who possess an advanced theory of mind (ToM) are viewed positively by their peers, but the empirical findings are mixed. This meta-analysis of 20 studies including 2,096 children (aged from 2 years, 8 months to 10 years) revealed a significant overall association (r = .19) indicating that children with higher ToM scores were also more popular in their peer group. The effect did not vary with age. The effect was we…
Neonatal Imitation
Theory of mind and prosocial behavior in childhood: A meta-analytic review
It has been argued that children who possess an advanced theory of mind (ToM) are more likely to act prosocially, yet the empirical findings are mixed. To address this issue definitively, a meta-analytic integration of all prior literature that met appropriate inclusion criteria was conducted. In total, 76 studies including 6,432 children between 2 and 12 years of age contributed to these analyses. Collapsed across all studies, a significant asso…
Peer social skills and theory of mind in children with autism, deafness, or typical development
Consequences of theory of mind (ToM) development for daily social lives of children are uncertain. Five to 13-year-olds (N = 195) with typical development, autism, or deafness (both native and late signers) took ToM tests and their teachers reported on their social skills for peer interaction (e.g., leadership, group entry). Groups differed in both ToM understanding (with late-signing deaf children especially delayed even relative to autistic chi…
Culture, Parenting, and Children's Theory of Mind Development in Indonesia
Children's theory of mind (ToM) unfolds reliably through a sequence of conceptual milestones including, but not limited to, false belief. Sequences vary with culture, one observed previously in Western cultures (Australia, the United States) and another in two non-Western cultures, China and Iran. Two explanations for cross-cultural sequence differences have been suggested: (a) collectivism versus individualism or (b) authoritarian versus authori…
Nimble negotiators: How theory of mind (ToM) interconnects with persuasion skills in children with and without ToM delay
Persuasion is an essential social skill. Yet its development and underpinnings are poorly understood. In 2 studies, a total of 167 children aged 3 to 12 years took theory of mind (ToM) tests and participated in unscripted, seminaturalistic persuasive conversations. Children were typically developing (TD) or had deafness or autism spectrum disorder (ASD). High-level, informationally rich persuasive arguments increased with age in all groups in bot…
Which button will I press? Preference for correctly ordered counting sequences in 18-month-olds
Correct counting respects the stable order principle whereby the count terms are recited in a fixed order every time. The 4 experiments reported here tested whether precounting infants recognize and prefer correct stable-ordered counting. The authors introduced a novel preference paradigm in which infants could freely press two buttons to activate videos of counting events. In the "correct" counting video, number words were always recited in the …
The Capricious Nature of Theory of Mind: Does Mental State Understanding Depend on the Characteristics of the Target
Using a between-groups design and random assignment, this study examined 214 Turkish children's (M = 11.66 years) mindreading and general reasoning about in-group members (Turks), similar out-group members (Syrians within Turkey) and dissimilar out-group members (Northern Europeans). Children heard four mindreading and four general reasoning stories with in-group or out-group members as targets. Whereas children's general reasoning about three gr…
In Two Minds: Similarity, Threat, and Prejudice Contribute to Worse Mindreading of Outgroups Compared With an Ingroup
We examined Turkish participants' mindreading accuracy toward ingroup versus outgroup targets. Three hundred and fifty-four Turkish participants were randomly assigned to one of three target groups: Turkish, Syrian, or Norwegian. The mindreading accuracy for these targets was measured along with the perceived cultural similarity of the target to the ingroup, as well as prejudice and threat perception. Participants evidenced higher mindreading acc…
Does Neonatal Imitation Exist? Insights From a Meta-Analysis of 336 Effect Sizes
Neonatal imitation is a cornerstone in many theoretical accounts of human development and social behavior, yet its existence has been debated for the past 40 years. To examine possible explanations for the inconsistent findings in this body of research, we conducted a multilevel meta-analysis synthesizing 336 effect sizes from 33 independent samples of human newborns, reported in 26 articles. The meta-analysis found significant evidence for neona…
Psychology (30 works) · Developmental psychology (27 works) · Child and Animal Learning Development (19 works) · Cognition (16 works) · Social Psychology (14 works) · Theory of mind (14 works) · Cognitive psychology (9 works) · Cultural Differences and Values (8 works) · Social Psychology (7 works) · Linguistics (6 works)