The preschool years have long been noted for fundamental advances in mentalizing – the social-cognitive capacity to construe oneself and others in terms of intentional mental states (Dennett, 1978; Fonagy et al., 2002). The timetable of the development of mentalizing has received much attention over the past decades (see Wellman, 2014). Yet, as mentalizing enters the child’s repertoire, the question arises as to when and which children make use of this new mental tool by mentalizing in varying social contexts. Despite the importance of such work for theories of mentalizing – particularly the interaction of mentalizing with motivational states and stress regulation (Ickes and Simpson, 2001; Tomasello et al., 2005; Fonagy and Luyten, 2009) – few if any experimental studies directly address the roles of context and disposition in mentalizing. Indeed, if mentalizing varies systematically as a function of context or arousal, it could be crucial to assess context-specific mentalizing capacities of clinical populations whose symptoms primarily appear under certain conditions, such as anxiety disorder (AD).

Mentalizing may be relevant to a broad set of social interactions, from dyadic emotion regulation and caregiving to cooperative and competitive interactions, more broadly (Dennett, 1987; Moore and Frye, 1991; Fonagy et al., 2002). Accordingly, individuals may be thought to mentalize in a wide variety of contexts with many authors proposing that mentalizing permeates our everyday social cognition (e.g., Wellman, 2014). Importantly, for the present purposes, the degree and cognitive control of mentalizing may still show cross-situational variation as the need and expectation to cooperate and compete with others fluctuates.

With this in mind, one important context for inducing shifts in social cognition may be exclusion from groups. As a fundamental process for humans, social exclusion blocks access to various group resources that, across phylogeny, were essential to survival, from group protection, to collaboration for provisions, to exchange of social information (Leary and Cottrell, 2013). Potentially for this reason, threats of exclusion still act as powerful triggers for conformity. Serving as a deterrent for exploiting others, threats of exclusion therefore also stabilize and promote cooperation (Ouwerkerk et al., 2005; Williams, 2009; Feinberg et al., 2014). Critically, to act on the first hints of and avoid further exclusion, excluded parties may potentially increase vigilance regarding social cues to promote more skillful re-affiliation (Pickett and Gardner, 2005; see below). Yet, few studies address such exclusion-responses early in development, especially with young children.

To date, the bulk of work on peer exclusion in early childhood has focused on risk factors for chronic peer rejection and its adverse developmental sequelae (e.g., Crick et al., 1999; von Klitzing et al., 2014). Consequently, we know relatively little about typical and atypical responses to experimental social exclusion at this age. A handful of studies examining exclusion among preschoolers uses indirect primes where the child observes the exclusion of a third party. Even this simple manipulation leads some preschoolers to behave in a way that suggests a reconnection motive has been engaged, including more accurate imitation of others (Over and Carpenter, 2009b; Watson-Jones et al., 2014) and drawing pictures of themselves and friends standing closer to one another (Song et al., 2015). Consistent with these findings, a recent study exposed preschoolers to firsthand exclusion while playing the virtual ball-toss game, Cyberball, also finding increased fidelity of imitation post-exclusion (Watson-Jones et al., 2016). Overall, these findings in young children resemble research on adults, showing increased affiliative tendencies (e.g., conformity, generosity, mimicry) following exclusion compared to control conditions (see Molden and Maner, 2013).

Given the behavioral affiliation-inducing effect of social exclusion, we sought to examine whether young children would also attend to mental states more closely after exclusion. Indeed, some theorists propose that exclusion gives rise to a state of “social hunger” (Gardner et al., 2000, p. 486) that stimulates social monitoring processes, akin to increased attention to food stimuli after fasting. Among adults, social exclusion thus promotes attentional biases to relevant social information (Pickett and Gardner, 2005), including others’ perspectives (Knowles, 2014). Coping with social exclusion by attending to other’s perspectives and mental states may enable more adept detection and selection of new partners likely to reciprocate while weeding out less promising partners. Many affiliative actions (e.g., helping) could also improve (in quality and quantity) if excluded parties attend to mental states of potential targets for re-affiliation so as to tailor affiliative actions to the needs, goals, and knowledge of those targets (Tomasello et al., 2005). Despite its clear potential for informing developmental theories on mentalizing, little or no work currently extends this work to social exclusion in young children. We therefore sought to address this gap in the literature with Study 1.

In a second Study, we moved beyond examining mentalizing in typically developing youth, to consider young children with elevated anxiety concerns. Deficits in social cognition and mentalizing have been linked to numerous childhood psychopathologies (Sharp et al., 2008). However, in the case of AD, one of the most prevalent conditions in childhood (Costello et al., 2011), the deficit in mentalizing has proven somewhat difficult to pin down (see Banerjee, 2008). While socially anxious young children have shown normal responses on standard false-belief tasks in most studies (Banerjee and Henderson, 2001; Broeren et al., 2013; but see Colonnesi et al., 2016), they have exhibited impairments in social behaviors requiring insight into mental states, in self-presentational tactics toward peers as well as in understanding the causes and emotional effects of unintentional insults (Banerjee and Watling, 2010).

Arguably, this pattern of data could be at least partly accounted for by context-specific deficits in mentalizing under affectively charged conditions, such as social exclusion. Thus, it has been proposed that controlled mentalizing varies as a function of the arousal induced by a specific context, following a trajectory of an inverted u-curve, i.e., first rising and then falling with increasing arousal (Fonagy and Luyten, 2009). Given the excessive negative arousal inherent in acute anxiety, deficits in stress-related mentalizing may typify anxious children (Nolte et al., 2011), much like what has been shown by pilot data in adults with panic disorder (Rudden et al., 2006). Moreover, in acute anxiety, one’s own and others’ thoughts often take on an imminent and threatening quality, which may derive from insufficient distinctions between one’s mental representation and reality, one of the hallmarks of a prementalizing mode (e.g., fear of imagined catastrophic separation outcomes, fear of negative evaluation by others; Fonagy et al., 2002). Thus, in Study 2 we examine young anxious children’s usage of mentalizing in an acute stress-context, following social exclusion.

In the current pair of studies, we used the virtual ball-toss game “Cyberball” (Williams et al., 2000) to manipulate social exclusion. Children were ostensibly connected to the Internet to toss a ball back and forth with two peers. The peers eventually stopped passing the ball to the subject (exclusion). Initially, we demonstrated that 5-year-olds excluded in Cyberball report higher threat to relational needs and attribute more bad intentions to co-players on post-Cyberball puppet interviews, as well as more tattling to experimenters on co-players than included children (White et al., unpublished).

Here, to capture young children’s mentalizing and affiliative responses to exclusion, we adapted a widely used narrative story-stem task that children completed before and after Cyberball. In this task, children are exposed to scripted story-beginnings and asked to show and tell the experimenter what happens next using toy figures (see Emde et al., 2003). Story-completion measures have a long history of use in studies of typical and atypical child development. Many of these studies have focused on the way children portray characters in their stories (e.g., parents, children) as a window to their internal representations of themselves and others (see Yuval-Adler and Oppenheim, 2014 for a review). Accordingly, studies suggest that the manner in which children portray the child- and parent-characters in their stories partly overlaps with actual real-world behaviors of these children and their caregiving experiences (Oppenheim et al., 1997; Toth et al., 1997). For example, the magnitude of children’s affiliative and aggressive themes in such narratives is associated with the tendency to express similar behaviors in various social contexts, as reported by clinicians, parents, or teachers (e.g., Kochanska et al., 1996; Hill et al., 2007; von Klitzing et al., 2007).

Recently, the story-stem approach has been broadened to assess children’s tendency to mentalize in their stories (Hill et al., 2007, 2008; Luyten and Fonagy, 2014). More specifically, this approach assesses the degree to which children treat story-characters as intentional agents, i.e., portraying figures as if they have goals and mental states.¹ For story-stems with positive themes, previous research has documented an association between mentalizing, as indexed by the story-stem approach, and theory of mind, as indexed by a traditional false-belief measure (Hill et al., 2008). By contrast, for stories with distressing themes mentalizing was associated with the child’s previous attachment history and their risk for externalizing disorders (Hill et al., 2007, 2008).

For the present studies, children completed scripted story beginnings, themed with peer exclusion and victimization. Importantly, and unlike most exclusion research to date (see Wesselmann et al., 2015), the open-ended story-completion method offers subjects much latitude to express a range of post-exclusion responses. Specifically, we chose this measure as it enabled assessment of spontaneous prosocial and aggressive responses as well as children’s tendency to mentalize before and after exclusion. Though rarely, if ever, used in the context of an experimental task such as Cyberball, the story-completion approach is particularly appealing for use with young children, who may otherwise struggle to verbalize their thoughts (Emde et al., 2003).

Given the aforementioned links between affiliative and aggressive themes in children’s story-completions and parallel behaviors in various social contexts, it seemed plausible that exclusion would affect children’s play analogous to adults’ affiliative responses to exclusion (e.g., Maner et al., 2007). For typically developing children in Study 1, we predicted that compared to controls, excluded children would portray more affiliation between characters in stories. While studies report that social exclusion can elicit aggression (e.g., Twenge et al., 2001; Will et al., 2014), few if any child studies report such effects. Thus, we explored, but did not predict any effects of exclusion on aggression between characters.

Beyond affiliation and aggression, story-completion narratives are well-placed to examine post-exclusion attention to mental states. Thus we assessed the degree to which children treat story-characters as intentional agents (Hill et al., 2008). In line with enhanced post-exclusion social monitoring (Pickett and Gardner, 2005), we predicted that exclusion, compared to a control condition, would lead children to portray characters using more mental state language (MSL) and with more intentionality. Because social monitoring is thought to enhance reconnection (Molden and Maner, 2013), we also predicted that increases in mentalizing would mediate the effect of exclusion on affiliative story-themes.

Aside from testing our main hypotheses, in Study 1 we also employed character-specific codes to assess whether or not children selectively describe mental states of some story-characters and direct affiliation toward some characters over others (i.e., victims vs. perpetrators in the story). Social monitoring putatively helps to select good and weed out poor targets for affiliation (Pickett and Gardner, 2005). Accordingly, we predicted that a social exclusion condition would result in increased references to both the victim’s and perpetrators’ mental states compared to a control condition. Regarding affiliative portrayals, we expected that excluded children would favor victims over perpetrators, as victims should qualify as more promising sources of affiliation.

Finally, in selecting an appropriate control condition for Study 1, we were aware that inclusion cues can also promote both prosocial and antisocial responses (see Over and Carpenter, 2009a; Waytz, 2013) and that inclusion also activates fewer behavioral responses compared to exclusion (e.g., tattling; White et al., unpublished). Also, we aimed to ensure that children are responding to the perceived intentions of excluders. We therefore opted for an accidental exclusion control condition in which children were informed afterward that exclusion occurred due to a computer malfunction. This maps onto procedures in adult studies showing that affiliative responses are reliably elicited by rejecting departures compared to accidental departures (e.g., Maner et al., 2007). As a manipulation check for this control condition, we assessed whether or not children attributed more bad intentions to regular vs. accidental excluders on a puppet interview, after learning about the alleged computer malfunction.

In Study 2, we aimed to test the proposal that childhood anxiety may coincide with stress-induced deficits in mentalizing (e.g., Nolte et al., 2011). Accordingly, we predicted that children with ADs would exhibit a decline in depicting story-characters using MSL and intentionality after exclusion compared to controls. In this study, we thus exposed all children to regular exclusion and examined its effect as a function of anxiety. Concerning affiliative themes, we did not make specific predictions because the research is inconsistent, with some work suggesting that anxious children are highly motivated to be accepted by others (Banerjee, 2008), but other research indicating that individuals with (social) anxiety have trouble enacting reconnection behaviors after exclusion (Mallott et al., 2009). For this study, we also broadened our age-range as compared to Study 1. We did this, first, because we aimed to provide initial evidence that the patterns documented in Study 1 are not circumscribed to preschoolers, but also generalize to older children. Second, pragmatic reasons also played a role as the recruitment of clinically referred young children with diagnosed ADs also posed a challenge.

This research is the first to show that exclusion leads young children to shift how much they attend to others’ mental states and that the extent to which they do so depends on their level of anxiety. Thus, exclusion, but not accidental exclusion, led typically developing preschoolers to tell stories that portrayed characters as intentional agents, with more references to characters’ mental states, and increased affiliation between characters (Study 1). Conversely, young children with ADs were less likely to portray characters as intentional agents and made fewer references to story-characters’ mental states after exclusion compared to a non-anxious control group who showed similar increases on these dimensions as in the first study (Study 2).

Across Studies 1 and 2, we provide the field with first experimental data documenting young children’s systematic moment-to-moment fluctuations in attention to others’ mental states. During this crucial stage of development in understanding mental states, children already appear capable of flexibly increasing or decreasing mentalizing to meet the needs of a given situation. Indeed, exclusion may compel children to increase mentalizing, paving the way toward more effective reconnection (Pickett and Gardner, 2005), as suggested by the parallel increase in affiliative story-themes and their mediation by intentionality and MSL in Study 1. Moreover, considering the character-specific findings, children appear to monitor other minds broadly (victims and perpetrators alike), but direct their affiliative motivation specifically to those targets who are most open to cooperation (victims).³ Excluded children’s contemplation of the mental states of those around them may thus help them navigate toward target individuals who are most worthwhile to approach in order to restore a sense of connection. In turn, closely attending to a target’s mental states may also facilitate post-exclusion affiliative behaviors by the excluded party, given that genuinely prosocial and cooperative actions demand that the actor keeps the needs and goals of the recipient in mind (Tomasello, 2014). In that sense, excluded children may be thought of as adopting a “cooperative mindset.”

A distinct, but related interpretation of our data may suggest that exclusion prompted children to more strongly anthropomorphize story-characters in an attempt to cope with exclusion. Indeed, other studies have documented that exclusion or a dispositionally high need for inclusion leads individuals to anthropomorphize ambiguous or inanimate agents, thus augmenting the perception of social connection (Epley et al., 2008; Powers et al., 2014). Scholars have speculated that these patterns may assist excluded individuals in seeking solace in imaginary “parasocial” relationships or reflect adjustment of information-processing thresholds after exclusion to seek out new partners in more places (Knowles, 2013; Molden and Maner, 2013). We would suggest that this account complements the view that excluded children adopt a “cooperative mindset,” in that increased mentalizing post-exclusion may prepare children should opportunities for reconnection arise.

However, adopting a “cooperative mindset” does not appear to be a universal response to exclusion. Indeed, young children with ADs instead showed a decline in attending to mental states after exclusion. This deficit in mentalizing upon social threat therefore provides one potentially important reason why anxious children may have trouble applying their intact mentalizing skills to affectively charged social situations (see Banerjee, 2008). Excessive negative arousal, typical of childhood anxiety, may interfere with controlled mentalizing, potentially resulting in a more automatic mode of mentalizing after exclusion, coinciding with reflexive assumptions about others’ internal states (Fonagy and Luyten, 2009).

Notably, we recently reported neural data suggesting that insecure attachment strategies lead children to respond to the Cyberball paradigm with more excessive and enduring negative expectations regarding re-inclusion than securely attached children (White et al., 2012, 2013). The present anxiety-related drop in mentalizing could set the stage for an over-extension of these negative expectations to other encounters after exclusion. Specifically, anxious children might effectively be making unjustified, reflexive, and sweeping assumptions about the mental attitudes of others toward themselves (automatic mentalization) that promotes generalization of their own negative views of themselves, others, and the world (“Nobody will ever let me back in”). Inasmuch as reduced mentalizing may then, in turn, impede affiliation after exclusion, it may partly explain why childhood anxiety is associated with increased risk for peer rejection in many studies (e.g., Perren et al., 2006; von Klitzing et al., 2014). Indeed, given that most individuals get exposed to exclusion at some point or another (Nezlek et al., 2012) – perhaps especially so in early childhood when children are less socially skilled and exclusion may even occur accidentally (Monks, 2011) – much may depend on the capacity to recover from exclusion once it has transpired.

A developmental theory of mental state understanding is incomplete as long as we know relatively little about the circumstances and dispositions that determine the extent to which children actually use this competence or not. Our findings show that social exclusion offers an important stimulus for the usage of mentalizing from preschool age onward. As excluded children weigh the benefits of reconnection (promotion) against the cost of potential further rejection (prevention; Molden and Maner, 2013), attending to others’ mental states may provide a useful “mental reconnection tool” to vigilantly filter, approach, and re-engage with potential social partners. However, this “mental reconnection tool” may not be readily available to all children facing social exclusion. Thus, we showed that children with ADs exhibit a drop in mentalizing following exclusion. Given a general model of mentalization and regulation of negative affect (Fonagy et al., 2002), it is likely that the process of impaired mentalizing under the social challenge of exclusion reflects a transdiagnostic vulnerability factor that more broadly lies at the core of developmental psychopathology.

Informed written consent was collected from all parents and all children also orally assented to the study. Four to 8-year-olds participated in a computerized ball-toss game during which they were eventually excluded. At the end of the procedure, all children were over-included in the game by a new set of children to dispel any potential negative emotions. An over-inclusion phase was deemed more suitable than debriefing for this age group in keeping with ethical guidelines for young children (Thompson, 1990). Parents were fully debriefed before the experimental procedure, providing ample time to withdraw from the study before the child played the ball-game (no parents withdrew).

Writing and revision of manuscript: LW, MC, AK, KvK, AG, YO, JH, HO, and PF; study design: LW, AK, KvK, MC, AG, YO, and PF; data-collection: LW, AK, and AG; and data analysis: LW, AK, AG, and YO.

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.