Objectives Externalizing behavior problems are considered to be a serious impediment to a child’s development, and therefore it is important to identify their predictors. In this study, we investigated the connections between school-aged boys’ externalizing problems, the mother’s reflective functioning (RF) and the mother’s perception of her childhood relationship with her own caregivers. Methods The study sample comprised 39 school-age boys diagnosed with externalizing behavior problems together with their mothers. A child’s psychopathology was assessed using the Child Behavior Checklist and Teacher Report Form. Our assessment of the mothers’ mentalizing capacities was based on the Adult Attachment Interview and Reflective Functioning Scale. The perception of a mother’s childhood relationship with her parents was assessed using the Parental Bonding Instrument. Results The analysis revealed that more severe cases of aggressive and rule-breaking behavior in boys were associated with lower RF in mothers, as well as with a mother’s perception of her childhood relationship with her own parents as less autonomous. More aggressive behavior in boys was also associated with a mother’s perception of herself as experiencing a higher degree of care from her father during her own childhood. Conclusions These are only preliminary findings and we have discussed them with a view to understanding the possible ways in which a mother’s RF and the intergenerational context of relationship quality are associated with externalizing behavior problems in middle childhood.
Using concepts developed by Goffman and the theory of inter-corporeality, this paper describes non-speaking spouses' responses to complaints made about them by the other spouse in the context of couple therapy first consultations. While the turn-taking system of couple therapy effectively precludes the possibility of a direct verbal response, non-speaking spouses often display bodily their disengagement from their spouse's talk. Using multimodal conversation analysis as the method, we show the repertoire of such disengagement behaviors and trace the moment-by-moment contexts in which they arise. While disengagement behaviors embody their producer's inattention to their spouse's talk, at the same time, they are, paradoxically, interactional moves produced in the presence of others, conveying their producer's negative stance to the ongoing talk. We argue that the timing of these disengagement practices involves anticipation of the direction of talk: non-speaking spouses display disengagement in moments when the speaking spouse's talk takes a direction toward an intensification of complaints about them.
In this multimethod study, we examine bereaved parents’ capacity for mentalizing the temporal dimension of their grief. The theoretical assumptions of our study draw on the clinical and anthropological perspectives on the passage of time in grief. Parents’ mentalization of their experience of grief was measured both in the attachment context, using the Adult Attachment Interview (AAI) and using the narrative Child Loss Interview (CLI). We used thematic analysis to code parents’ mentalizing utterances in order to categorize time-related changes during the grieving process. Parents generally mentalize their grief-related experiences at a lower level of reflective functioning than their general attachment experiences. However, a higher general ability to mentalize contributes to a higher level of RF and greater coherence in mentalizing their grief. Parents experience time in grief through oscillation between the past with the deceased child and a restricted form of existence in the present reality.
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