The Development of Social Cognition in Filipino Deaf and Hearing Individuals

This thesis examined the nature and pattern of development of social cognition in Filipino deaf and hearing individuals. Predictive factors and social consequences of social cognition were also studied. Prior studies are restricted due to the focus on specific skills, the poverty on work in non-Western deaf samples, and the limited understanding of the relationship between social cognition and social behaviour. To establish parity with extant research, the five studies reported in this thesis examined the abilities of Filipino deaf individuals 8 to 22 years and hearing children 3 to 14 years on well-established measures of Theory of Mind (ToM) and emotion knowledge. Results revealed that hearing children outperformed the deaf in ToM and emotion understanding (EU). Yet, affective recognition and labelling (ARL) scores were comparable. Findings also showed that the nature of ToM development is the same between deaf and hearing children. Similar to children from Western cultures, Filipino children’s ToM understanding follows the following sequence: diverse desires > diverse beliefs > knowledge access > false belief > hidden emotions. In contrast, two slightly patterns of EU emerged. Furthermore, language ability was robustly associated with ToM, EU, and ARL. However, parents’ predominant use of signed communication led to poorer ToM scores in the deaf. Finally, EU and language ability were found to be predictive of prosocial actions of deaf individuals. These findings were thought to be linked to certain cultural values and parenting practices that influence the kinds of interpersonal and communicative interactions Filipino deaf children experience. Further research is needed to examine closely specific cultural variables and naturally occurring discourse between Filipino parents and their deaf children that could potentially impact deaf children’s understanding of mind and emotions

A cultural conundrum: Delayed false-belief understanding in Filipino children

Theory of mind (ToM) is the child’s representational understanding of mental states (e.g., true and false beliefs) and how these influence people’s overt behavior. Past research in numerous Western and a few non-Western cultures has suggested that children throughout the world master a key milestone in ToM development, false-belief understanding, by age 5 to 6 years. However, before drawing theoretical conclusions about such apparent cross-cultural synchrony in timing, investigation of a broader range of non-Western cultures is crucial. We selected the Philippines because there has been no known previous study of ToM development in this population. A sample of 78 Filipino children aged 3 through 6 years took three standard false-belief tests and a measure of language ability in their mother tongue. The results revealed strikingly poor ToM performance. Only 12% of the full sample (Mage = 4.95 years) passed any false-belief test at all, and only 15% of those older than 5 years (Mage = 5.54 years; n = 39) displayed ToM by passing two out of three tests. ToM was unrelated to parents’ educational background, family size, and child language ability. Nor could methodological factors (e.g., type of false-belief test used) readily explain Filipino children’s exceptionally slow false-belief mastery. Further study is clearly needed to confirm and extend these intriguing results. Based on past evidence from other cultures, possible influences of parental conversation and socialization styles warrant further exploration in the Filipino context

Differences in emotion knowledge among Filipino deaf children, adolescents, and young adults

Developmental evidence regarding emotion knowledge and deafness has come almost exclusively from Western populations. In this study, we examined associations between deafness, emotion understanding (EU), and affective recognition and labelling (ARL) in deaf and hearing individuals from the Philippines. A sample of 205 Filipino participants (102 deaf; ages 8 to 22 years) completed the Diagnostic Assessment of Non-Verbal Ability – 2 and the Test of Emotion Comprehension to measure ARL and EU, respectively. Results from hierarchical linear regressions show that, after controlling for age and verbal ability, both groups were on par on total ARL skills. In contrast, the deaf cohort performed poorer on total EU relative to the hearing controls over and above age and verbal ability. Several possible explanations for findings were also discussed