Findings of Preliminary Analysis

The data from current study replicated the common findings of a positive relationship between age and performance on ToM as well as EF tasks. The scores on ToM tasks showed a significant correlation with age indicating that mental state understanding increased with the age of the children. There is substantial evidence to support this link in literature (Hughes 1998; Carlson and Moses 2001; Wellman et al. 2001; Carlson et al. 2004; Wellman and Liu 2004; Newton and Jenvey 2011). Furthermore, there were significant differences in the performance of three age groups on total score of ToM scale. The performance of 6-7 year olds was significantly higher than that of 5-6 and 4-5 year olds. Likewise, the 5-6 year olds performed significantly higher than the 4-5 year olds. Moreover, these differences were fairly consistent across all cultural groups.

The performance on EF tasks also had a significant positive relation with age, indicating that the older children exhibited better executive functioning abilities than the younger ones. These findings are also consistent with existing literature that suggests an increased improvement in EF during childhood (Carlson and Moses 2001; Pellicano 2007). A similar trend was also observed for the pro-social subscale of MASCS. A significant positive correlation existed between age and teacher’s ratings of pro-social behaviours. This indicated that older children exhibited more co-operative and empathic behaviours than the younger ones. Existing literature on social competence also supports the views that as the children grow older their tendency to exhibit pro-social behaviours increases (Svetlova et al. 2011; Farrant et al. 2012). However, there was no significant

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relationship between age and the anti-social subscale of MASCS. The findings suggested a similar developmental trend in ToM, EF and social competence during 5-8 years of age. Older children showed an increased understanding of mental states, their executive functioning abilities were better than younger children, and at the same time they started exhibiting more pro-social behaviours.

The findings of the current study revealed a significant difference in the scores of female and male participants on ToM tasks. These results suggested that females exhibit a better understanding of mental states than their male

counterparts. These results are consistent with the findings of Calero et al. (2013), who tested 6-8 year olds on the same ToM scale as used in the present study and found that girls had a significant advantage over boys in understanding of all mental states. Likewise, Devine and Hughes (2013) reported that females outperformed males on a latent ToM task in a sample of 8-13 year olds. Similar findings were also reported by Bosacki and Astington (1999), where 9-11 year old girls performed better on ToM tasks. However, when separate independent-

samples t-test were performed to investigate gender differences in three age groups the difference was only significant for 6-7 year olds. The lack of gender differences in younger children in the present study, can be explained by the gender intensification hypothesis (Hill and Lynch 1983), which postulates that gender differences escalate with age due to increased pressure to confirm to expected gender roles. This argument is also validated by studies that tested children between 3-6 years of age and found no gender differences on ToM tasks (Raza and Blair 2009; Hughes et al. 2011).

Although, there was a significant gender difference on ToM performance for the overall sample, this difference was not consistent across cultures. When the three cultural groups were tested separately for gender differences, the difference in the scores of females and males was only significant for the British Pakistani group. There were no significant gender differences in the performance of White British and Pakistani samples. Similar findings have also been previously reported by Caputi et al. (2012) who found no gender differences in a longitudinal study that tested children at 5, 6, and 7 years. Likewise, Wang et al (2016) tested 10 to 16

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year olds from UK and Hong Kong and found no gender differences in

performance on ToM or EF tasks. The inconsistency of gender differences in mental understanding could possibly be attributed to the tasks used for measuring ToM. Most of the studies investigating ToM use FB as a standard measure of ToM and it appears that the effect of gender on FB understanding is minimal. There is a possibility that males and females differ only in their understanding of certain mental states. The investigation of gender differences on individual ToM tasks for the British Pakistani sample revealed that the difference was significant on only two ToM tasks; diverse belief and hidden emotion. It can be argued that early experiences of male and female children could contribute to the understanding of certain mental states. For example, regarding emotions, it has been reported that mothers, as well as older siblings, talk more about emotions and feelings to girls than boys in toddlerhood (Dunn et al. 1987; Cervantes and Callanan 1998). It has also been documented that early references to mental state talk are linked to later ToM understanding (Brown et al. 1996; Ensor and Hughes 2008; Ensor et al. 2014). In other words, it seems plausible that since girls experience more

references to emotions in their conversations with the family at an early age, they tend to perform better than boys on the hidden emotion task. There is a possibility that girls and boys differ more in understanding of affective mental states rather than cognitive mental states. However, the current findings suggest that these differences appear to be moderate and not very consistent.