• Researchers interested in the development of social cognition study how children’s understanding of themselves, other people, and relationships between people changes with age. Compared with nonsocial cognition, social cognition involves the challenge of comprehending how both inner states and external forces affect people’s behaviour.

• The earliest aspect of the self to emerge is the I-self, a sense of self as knower and actor. Its beginnings lie in infants’ recognition that their own actions cause objects and people to react in predictable ways. During the second year, toddlers start to construct the me-self, a reflective observer who treats the self as an object of knowledge and evaluation. Parents who respond to infants’ and toddlers’ signals consistently and sensitively (as indicated by secure attachment) are advanced in early self-development.
• By the end of the second year, self-recognition is well established, as revealed by reactions of toddlers to their own image and use of language to refer to themselves. Self-awareness underlies the emergence of self-conscious emotions, perspective taking, empathy, sustained imitative play, peer competition for objects, and cooperation.

• Language development permits young preschoolers to construct a categorical self as they classify themselves and others on the basis of age, sex, physical characteristics, and goodness and badness. Conversations with adults about the past lead to an autobiographical memory-a life-story narrative that grants the child a remembered self imbued with cultural values.
• Infants’ implicit appreciation of people as animate beings whose behaviour is governed by intentions, desires, and feelings and who can share inner states sets the stage for an inner self of private thoughts and imaginings. As 2-year-olds talk about mental states, they form a desire theory of mind, in which they integrate desire with perception and emotion. Around age 4, children’s theory of mind becomes a belief-desire theory, as mastery of false-belief tasks reveals their understanding that both beliefs and desires determine actions.
• Belief-desire reasoning is related to advances in social skills. Among children who pass false-belief tasks, sociodramatic play is more mature and eyewitness memories more accurate.
• Many factors contribute to the development of belief-desire reasoning, including language development; cognitive skills of inhibition, flexible thinking, and planning; make-believe play; and social interaction with siblings, friends, and adults. Some researchers believe that the human brain is biologically prepared to develop a belief-desire theory. Others think that belief-desire is supported by general cognitive development.

• The me-self expands as preschoolers construct a self-concept, or set of beliefs about their own characteristics. In middle childhood, self-concept changes from a focus on observable characteristics and typical emotions and attitudes to an emphasis on personality traits, positive and negative characteristics, and social comparisons. In adolescence, self-descriptions become more abstract and form an organized system that places greater emphasis on social virtues and personal and moral values.
• Changes in self-concept are supported by cognitive development, perspective-taking skills (as suggested by Mead’s concept of the generalized other), and feedback from others. In describing themselves, children tend to be more egoistic and competitive in individualistic cultures, more concerned with the welfare of others in collectivist cultures.

• Self-esteem, the judgments we make about our own worth, differentiates, becomes hierarchically organized, and declines over the first few years of elementary school as children start to make social comparisons. Except for a temporary drop associated with school transition, self-esteem rises from grade 4 on, and new dimensions are added in adolescence. For most young people, becoming an adolescent leads to feelings of pride and self-confidence.
• Various aspects of self-esteem are strongly correlated with everyday behaviours. A generally positive profile is associated with positive adjustment, a profile of low self-regard in all areas with poor adjustment. Cultural forces affect self-esteem, as illustrated by cultural differences in the role of social comparison. Child-rearing practices that are warm and accepting and that provide reasonable expectations for mature behaviour are consistently related to high self-esteem.

• Research on achievement-related attributions has identified adult messages that affect children’s self-esteem and achievement motivation. During middle childhood, children begin to distinguish ability, effort, and external factors in attributions for success and failure.
• Children with mastery-oriented attributions credit their successes to high ability and failures to insufficient effort. They hold an incremental view of ability-that it can be improved through trying hard. In contrast, children with learned helplessness attribute their successes to luck and failures to low ability. They hold an entity view of ability-that it is fixed and cannot be changed.
• Adolescents have a fully differentiated understanding of the relation between ability and effort. Those with learned helplessness quickly conclude that mastering a challenging task is not worth the cost-extremely high effort. In this way, they fail to realize their potential.
• Children who experience negative feedback about their ability, messages that evaluate their traits, pressure to focus on performance goals, and unsupportive teachers are likely to develop learned helplessness. Teachers who are caring and helpful, who emphasize learning over performance goals, and who stress effort and interpersonal harmony in their classrooms foster a mastery orientation.
• Attribution retraining, which encourages learned-helpless children to believe they can overcome failure if only they exert more effort, has improved the self-evaluations and task performance of learned-helpless children. Teaching children to focus less on grades and more on mastering tasks for their own sake and providing instruction in metacognition and self-regulation also are effective.

• Erikson first recognized identity-the construction of a solid self-definition consisting of self-chosen values and goals-as the major personality achievement of adolescence. In complex societies, a period of exploration is necessary to form a personally meaningful identity. Because university students have many opportunities to explore career options and lifestyles, they make more progress toward achieving an identity than they did in high school.
• Identity achievement and moratorium (exploration) are psychologically healthy identity statuses. Long-term identity foreclosure (commitment without exploration) and identity diffusion (absence of clear direction) are related to adjustment difficulties.
• Adolescents who have a flexible, open-minded approach to grappling with competing beliefs and values and who feel attached to parents but free to voice their own opinions are likely to be advanced in identity development. Close friendships offer emotional support and role models of identity development. Schools and communities that provide young people with rich and varied options for exploration support the search for identity. Ethnic minority youths who construct a bicultural identity are advantaged in many aspects of emotional and social development.

• During the first few years, children become increasingly skilled at distinguishing intentional from unintentional acts. By age 4, they move beyond a fusion of intention with behaviour to an understanding of intention as an internal mental state that is distinct from other mental states and from the outcomes of actions. During middle childhood, they can better detect people’s efforts to conceal their intentions.
• Person perception concerns how we size up the attributes of people with whom we are familiar. Like their self-concepts, children’s descriptions of other people place greater emphasis on personality traits and become more differentiated and organized with age.
• Basic concepts of race and ethnicity emerge in the preschool years, and children distinguish rich from poor on the basis of physical characteristics. By the early school years, children absorb prevailing attitudes toward social groups. But they do not necessarily directly adopt the attitudes of parents and friends; rather, they seem to pick up information about group status from implicit messages in their environments.
• The capacity to classify the social world in multiple ways leads prejudice to decline in middle childhood. Children who view personality as fixed, have high self-esteem, and experience a social world in which people are sorted into groups are more likely to harbour prejudices.

• Perspective taking improves greatly from childhood to adolescence, as Selman’s five-stage sequence indicates. Mastery of Piagetian tasks and a view of the mind as an active interpreter of experience are related to advances in perspective taking. Around age 6, children understand that prior knowledge affects people’s ability to understand new information. Between 6 and 8 years, they realize that people’s pre-existing beliefs can affect their viewpoints. During adolescence, recursive thought is mastered.
• The ability to understand the viewpoints of others contributes to diverse social skills. Angry, aggressive young people have great difficulty imagining the thoughts and feelings of others. Interventions that teach perspective-taking skills reduce antisocial behaviour and increase prosocial responding.

• With age, children become better at resolving conflict through social problem solving. Components of the social problem-solving process-encoding and interpreting social cues, clarifying social goals, generating and evaluating strategies, and enacting responses-become more strongly linked to socially competent behaviour in middle childhood. Training in social problem solving leads to improved peer relations and academic performance.

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