Testing the Effectiveness of a Social Cognition Training Programme on Pre-Schoolers’ Social Cognition and Humor Understanding

Social cognition helps children to develop an understanding of their own and others’ mental states, which facilities social interaction. Humour is a multidimensional skill that includes cognitive, social and emotional aspects that may be shared mechanisms with social cognition. Although we know that both skills are positively related to each other, there is no study to investigate their causal relationship so far. The present study aimed to find out whether there is a causal relationship between social cognition and humour in 3-year-olds. While half of 40 children were assigned to the experimental group, who were trained on emotion and false belief understanding, the other half were assigned to the control group, who were trained on Piagetian conservation tasks for approximately one month. All of the children completed three different versions of social cognition tasks, and one humour appreciation and production test, at both baseline and post-test. There was no significant training effect on either social cognition or humour skills in pre-schoolers, controlling for baseline scores. Several possible explanations for the pattern of findings and recommendations for future research are discussed.