Twenty years of research on parental mind-mindedness: Empirical findings, theoretical and methodological challenges, and new directions

Highlights

• 20 years of research on the construct of parental mind-mindedness is reviewed.

• Theoretical issues that require clarification to advance the field are identified.

• Methodological issues (discriminant validity, developmental issues) are considered.

• Five key new research directions are identified.

Abstract

Mind-mindedness refers to a caregiver’s tendency to treat the young child as an individual with a mind of his or her own. It is assessed in the first year of life by the caregiver’s tendency to comment appropriately on, and not misread, the infant’s mental states (thoughts, feelings, preferences) during interaction and in older children by the caregivers’ spontaneous use of mental state words in response to an invitation to describe their child. This narrative review first describes the construct and its theoretical origins as well as the different approaches to measurement. We then critically review 20 years of empirical literature linking mind-mindedness to indices of the parent–child attachment relationship and child developmental outcomes, and exploring the properties of the construct. We conclude by identifying key theoretical and methodological questions that need to be addressed in order to advance the field as well as potential clinical applications.

Introduction

Almost 20 years ago now, Meins (1997) coined the term parental mind-mindedness to refer to caregivers’ proclivity to attribute mental states to their young children. With the ambitious goal of rethinking maternal sensitivity (Meins, Fernyhough, Fradley, & Tuckey, 2001), Meins (1999) drew on attachment and social-cognitive theories to propose that mind-mindedness was the cognitive substrate of parental responsiveness during parent-child interactions. For the first 10 years, much of the published research was conducted at the laboratory that developed the construct. As time passed, however, teams from different countries started to publish their findings with mind-mindedness, providing an increasingly rich data base. Mind-mindedness has been proposed as a theoretical construct that can advance our understanding of the processes that underpin the intergenerational transmission of attachment and one that is relatively straightforward to operationalize empirically (Meins, 1999, Meins, 2013). With almost two decades of published work, the time is ripe to evaluate whether mind-mindedness has fulfilled its ambitious promises. This paper first presents an overview of the theoretical background to mind-mindedness, followed by a review of empirical research that considers the merits and shortcomings of existing conceptualizations and identifies inconsistencies, controversies and questions that have not yet been adequately answered. We conclude with suggested directions for future research and theory development.

Mind-mindedness captures a caregiver’s attunement to his or her infant’s mental states, including emotions, preferences, motives and goals, and the tendency to interpret behavior as resulting from these mental states. Meins (2013) emphasized the origins of the construct in attachment theory, particularly Mary Ainsworth’s seminal work on maternal sensitivity and her explicit focus on the caregiver’s capacity to accurately perceive and interpret her infant’s signals and communications (Ainsworth, Bell, & Stayton, 1974). Meins et al. (2001) described mind-mindedness as a naturalistic measure of caregivers’ representations of their child’s mental states grounded in real-time interaction. Thus the construct is considered to be at the interface of representations and behavior (Meins, 2013).

In an influential meta-analysis, Van IJzendoorn (1995) explored evidence that parents’ representations of their own childhood attachment experiences (or “attachment state of mind”) as revealed in narrative interviews predicted the quality of the attachment relationships they formed with their children (Adult Attachment Interview; AAI; Main, Kaplan, & Cassidy, 1985), and whether maternal sensitivity was the pathway through which these associations were mediated. Contrary to expectations, maternal sensitivity accounted for only a modest portion of the common variance between maternal state of mind regarding attachment and child attachment security, a so-called “transmission gap” (p. 398), recently confirmed in a larger meta-analysis (Verhage et al., 2016). As a result, Van IJzendoorn (1995) called for a refinement in approaches to measurement of caregiver sensitivity. In response, Meins et al. (2001) developed a brief laboratory-based assessment of caregiver linguistic behaviors that focused on the accuracy of the caregiver’s reading of the child’s cues, based on Ainsworth’s proposition (Ainsworth et al., 1974) that the mother’s capacity to see things from the child’s point of view and understand the intention underlying infant signals was crucial to providing a timely and appropriate response, the core element of parental sensitivity. Meins further proposed that this capacity to accurately represent the child’s mental states had the potential to bridge the transmission gap (Meins, 1999).

The development of the construct was also influenced by Vygotsky’s (1978;1987) ideas about the dialogic nature of higher mental functions (Fernyhough, 2008) and the importance of social-environmental influences, particularly adult language and scaffolding during interaction, for children’s learning, particularly their social understanding. Meins (1997) proposed that caregivers who are oriented to the mental states of their infants have the capacity to recognize their infant’s cognitive potential and provide appropriate developmental challenges to maximize their learning opportunities, particularly with respect to social cognition and emotion understanding.

From these origins, early research on mind-mindedness sought to demonstrate links between mind-mindedness and attachment constructs (particularly maternal sensitivity, maternal state of mind with respect to attachment, and mother-child attachment security) as well as children’s emerging cognitive capacities and social understanding (particularly theory of mind).

Before examining how the construct is operationalized and reviewing empirical research, we briefly consider mind-mindedness in the context of related constructs that focus on adult mentalizing in the context of the parent-child relationship, notably reflective functioning (RF) and insightfulness. Mentalizing, broadly defined as the ability to interpret and predict the behavior of self and others in relation to mental processes, was originally coded from adult accounts (retrospective) of the behavior of their own caregivers during the AAI, referred to as reflective functioning (Fonagy, Steele, Steele, Moran, & Higgitt, 1991). Later the coding system was applied to analysis of descriptions of the self as parent and the child in the current parent-child relationship using transcripts of the Parent Development Interview (PDI; Aber, Slade, Berger, Bresney, & Caplan, 1985) with a focus on the frequency, content, and coherence of mind-related speech (Zeegers, Colonnesi, Stam, & Meins, 2017). The assessment of Insightfulness takes a different approach; caregiver inferences about the motives underpinning child behavior are assessed by interviewing parents as they watch video footage of their child (Oppenheim, Koren-Karie, & Sagi, 2001).

Consistent with Meins’ proposition that mind-mindedness is at the interface of representations and behavior and shares theoretical origins with the reflective functioning scale for the AAI (Meins, 1999), Rosenblum, McDonough, Sameroff, and Muzik (2008) have proposed that mind-mindedness might be considered a type of reflective functioning in action; that is, mothers’ explicit linguistic attributions of mental states to their infants may depend on their capacity to mentalize more generally. Meins, Fernyhough, and Harris-Waller (2014), however, emphasized the crucial distinction between competence in mentalizing abilities and the proclivity to use this capacity spontaneously to describe and explain behavior. One key way in which mind-mindedness differs is that both reflective functioning and insightfulness are assessed through invitations to the caregiver to reflect about their child’s motivations and/or relationship, whereas mind-mindedness is based on caregivers’ spontaneous comments regarding child mental states. Further, it is the only one of the measures of parent mentalizing that can be assessed from live parent-child interaction. A recent three level meta-analysis pooling data from these parent mentalizing measures (Zeegers et al., 2017) has demonstrated that parent ability to tune in to the child’s mental states predicts child attachment security and parent sensitivity, and that sensitivity mediates the relation between mentalizing and child attachment security. As we describe later, however, there is little empirical evidence regarding the similarities or differences among the various mentalizing constructs (Zeegers et al., 2017).