EN
Two studies investigated whether there is a link between understanding of mind and facial expressions recognition. In Study 1 eighty-nine 4-year-olds completed false beliefs tasks, included also questions about desire and surprise, and two tests of facial expressions processing: recognition and matching. False belief understanding was found to share 16.5% of variance with recognition and matching of facial expressions, independently of age and parents education, which suggests that both domains of social cognition could influence each other in 4-year-olds. There was no link between understanding of surprise and recognition of facial expression of surprise. This result contradicts a hypothesis that errors in recognition of surprise are due to the conceptual problems. In Study 2 with fifty 7-year-olds there was found that matching of facial expressions still accounted for some part of variance in second-order false belief tasks but the relation was not reciprocal. Results are discussed in terms of componential view of theory of mind. .