Children's Thinking About Mind and Emotion

4.0 credits

Successfully navigating the world requires learning how to make reasonable estimates about what other people might be thinking and feeling. In this seminar, we will discuss how children come to think about themselves and others in terms of their mental states (e.g., desires, thoughts, beliefs, emotions, preferences, knowledge, expectations). The course will also highlight, however, that mental state understanding is a lifelong process that does not end when we hit a specified level of understanding. This seminar will be heavily focused on critically evaluating methodological choices and what these decisions mean for what we know about people’s thinking about mind and emotion.