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Children's peer relations represent a key aspect of school adjustment. However, little is known about their social-cognitive precursors. To address this gap, the authors followed 70 children across the transition to primary school. At Time 1 (age 5), Time 2 (age 6), and Time 3 (age 7), children were assessed on their theory of mind, prosocial behavior, and verbal ability. In addition, at Time 2 and at Time 3, the authors gathered peer nominations. Results supported the authors' mediational hypothesis of indirect paths from early theory of mind to subsequently lower peer rejection and higher peer acceptance, via improvements in prosocial behavior. The authors discuss implications of these longitudinal effects for the understanding of the impact of social-cognitive achievements for children's developing social relations.

Theory of mind refers to the ability to recognize the existence of mental states and to predict and explain social behavior on the basis of these mental states (Astington, 1993; Wellman, 1990). Almost 30 years of research in this area have shown not only the existence of a dramatic improvement in theory of mind during preschool years (Wellman, Cross, & Watson, 2001) but also substantial individual differences between children of the same age (Cutting & Dunn, 1999; Repacholi & Slaughter, 2003). In the present article, we investigated whether and how individual differences in children's theory of mind predict...