Maternal attachment and mind-mindedness: the role of emotional specificity

Abstract

We explored the relation between maternal mind-mindedness (i.e., a mother's tendency to verbally refer to her infant's mental world through use of infant-directed mental state terms) and maternal attachment. Mothers (N = 76), classified prenatally as Autonomous, Dismissing, Preoccupied, and Unresolved using the Adult Attachment Interview (AAI), simulated speaking to their 6-month-old infants in positive and negative emotion contexts. Mothers' utterances were coded for frequency of use of emotion and cognition-related mind-minded terms. Results indicated a significant negative relation between coherence of mind scores on the AAI and emotion mind-mindedness in the positive emotion context. When differences between insecure attachment categories and mind-mindedness were explored, results indicated that mothers with Preoccupied attachments were significantly more likely to use emotion-related terms than mothers with Dismissing attachments and that these differences were most pronounced in the negative emotion context. A similar pattern was found for mothers with Unresolved attachments compared to those with organized (Autonomous, Dismissing, Preoccupied) attachment classifications, however use of emotion mind-minded terms did not differ by emotional context. Future research directions highlighting the importance of exploring the unique contribution of Preoccupied, Dismissing and Unresolved attachment and emotional context in the exploration of mind-mindedness are discussed.

Caregiver’s Mind-Mindedness in Early Center-based Childcare

“…In other words, play situations evoke more mind-related comments than mealtime situations, which is in line with previous research showing that play situations elicit more sensitive responses and stimulation from caregivers (e.g., Hallam et al, 2016;Klette et al, 2018). Play is the predominant context in the mind-mindedness paradigm, however, previous studies on parental mind-mindedness have proposed assessing mind related comments in specific 'attachment-activating contexts' (Bigelow, Power, Bulmer, & Gerrior, 2015;Milligan, Khoury, Benoit, & Atkinson, 2015). Situations in a more challenging context may elicit more cues from children and more non-attuned comments from caregivers (McMahon & Bernier, 2017).…”

Fathers’ and Mothers’ Early Mind-Mindedness Predicts Social Competence and Behavior Problems in Childhood

“…Insecure attachment may, therefore, be one of the mechanisms linking parental mind-mindedness to children’s behavior problems. Future research on the association between parents’ mind-mindedness and children’s difficulties should, therefore, include a measure of attachment, and should examine parents’ spontaneous use of mind-related comments in attachment-activating rather than free-play contexts, to increase the specificity and sensitivity of the measure (Bigelow et al 2015; McMahon and Bernier 2017; Milligan et al 2015; McMahon and Newey 2018).…”

Non‐Attuned Mind‐Mindedness, Infant Negative Affect, and Emotional Availability: Assessing Mind‐Mindedness during the Still‐Face Paradigm

“…Second, we were able to explore transactional associations between mind‐mindedness and observed infant negative affect. Although two previous studies have assessed mind‐mindedness during stressful interactions (Bigelow et al., ; Milligan et al., ), neither assessed maternal mind‐related language during live interaction with an infant.…”

“…We speculated that infant emotion cues might be more frequent in a stressful interactive context and that caregivers might be more likely to selectively attend to or misread negative cues, particularly if they were having difficulties regulating their own personal distress (Dykas & Cassidy, 2011;Leerkes, 2010;Lin & McFatter, 2012). To our knowledge, only two studies to date have examined mind-mindedness in attachment-activating contexts (Bigelow, Power, Bulmer, & Gerrior, 2015;Milligan, K, Benoit, & Atkinson, 2015). Both used idiosyncratic approaches to eliciting and coding mind-mindedness that differed substantially from coding manual guidelines, and neither focused on non-attuned comments.…”