How Children Develop Social Understanding

Jeremy Carpendale is Associate Professor of Psychology at Simon Fraser University, Canada.Charlie Lewis is Professor of Family and Developmental Psychology at Lancaster University, UK.

"The best book there is on children's social-cognitive development - full stop." Michael Tomasello, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology and Wolfgang Köhler Primate Research Center"This extraordinarily comprehensive book provides a lucid account of how children develop social understanding. The authors promise broad inquiry into social development and they consistently deliver pushing well beyond a thorough review of the enormous body of prior work on theory of mind. This book will awaken interest in key developmental questions by a new generation of students who become acquainted with the book in upper level seminars or graduate courses where it most certainly should be assigned." Nancy Budwig, Professor of Psychology, Clark University, USA "Carpendale and Lewis provide an exceptionally clear analysis of the prominent theoretical explanations of children’s understanding of beliefs. This work won’t end debate, but it may fundamentally revise the research agenda so that the steps along the way to social understanding are more fully revealed." Professor Hildy Ross, University of Waterloo, Canada "Professors searching for a theoretically rigorous and empirically accurate text to introduce students to the development of children’s social cognition will find what they seek in this text. So too will more advanced scholars and students who desire a comprehensive and incisive treatment of the increasingly vast literature on this topic, and the many lively debates it excites. Hats off to Carpendale and Lewis for a job well done." Jack Martin, Fraser University "How Children Develop Social Understanding is an appreciable piece of work, and I hope Carpendale and Lewis will continue in their successful effort to give us a thoughtful view of children's social-cognitive development. Furthermore, I hope that this book will attract new young researchers from all over the world to the study of a fabulous topic, the development of the child as a social human being." PsycCRITIQUES Volume 51, Issue 43 "This is an important book, and it succeeds on many levels. Most notably, the extensive literature on children's theory of mind is masterfully reviewed and critically assessed in relation to the accumulated findings, replications of findings, and failures to replicate." Human Development 2006; Issue 49

• Series Editor's Preface. Preface.1. Social Understanding and Social Interaction: An introduction to the issues.2. Contemporary Theories of Social Understanding.3. Understanding False Beliefs.4. The Development of Social Understanding in Infancy.5. Domain General Approaches to Reasoning about the Mind.6. Social Interaction and the Development of Social Understanding: The role of relationships in social cognitive development.7. Language and Social Understanding.8. Beyond (False) Belief: What do preschoolers still have to learn about the mind?.9. Social Understanding and Children's Social Lives.10. Constructing an Understanding of Mind.References.Author Index.Subject Index.