Linguistic and socio-cognitive predictors of school-age children’s narrative evaluations about jealousy

This study investigated children's narrative evaluations about jealousy in relation to performance on a higher-order perspective-taking task and assessments of receptive vocabulary and nonverbal intelligence. Eighty children (5; 0-11; 11) narrated a wordless picture book about a jealous frog, answered probe questions about the plot, and generated a personal narrative about a situation where they had felt like the frog. Each task was coded for evaluative components of jealousy understanding. With age, children were more likely to mention a jealousy-related mental state, relationship interference, and use the term jealous. Although girls used the term jealous more often than boys, the effect of gender on jealousy understanding was significant only in probe-question responses. Regression analyses revealed bi-directional relationships between jealousy understanding and perspective-taking skills in the two narrative tasks, with age and receptive vocabulary independently predicting perspective taking, but not jealousy understanding. That is, effects of vocabulary and age on narrative evaluations of jealousy were fully mediated by development in higher-order perspective-taking skills.