When Words Just Won’t Do: Introducing Parental Embodied Mentalizing

Shai, Dana; Belsky, Jay

doi:10.1111/j.1750-8606.2011.00181.x

Cited by 114 publications

(102 citation statements)

References 47 publications

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“…Some years ago, Shai and Belsky (2011) stated that sole reliance on verbal processes may be unsuccessful in capturing mentalizing processes, thus they introduced the notion of parental embodied mentalizing, which refers to the parental ability to implicitly understand the child’s mental states through all the movements of her/his body and to attune with them through their own kinesthetic patterns. Thus, they hypothesized that it is this form of unconscious mentalization that needs to be investigated in order to study the parental capacity to be adequately responsive to the child’s emotional needs.…”

Section: Discussion and Direction For Future Researchmentioning

confidence: 99%

Mentalizing Makes Parenting Work: A Review about Parental Reflective Functioning and Clinical Interventions to Improve It

Camoirano¹

2017

Front. Psychol.

242

213

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In the last decade several studies have investigated the role of parental reflective functioning (RF), defined as the parental ability to understand his/her child’s mental states, on the child’s development. Herein, a narrative review on parental RF is presented aimed at (1) presenting an overview of the existing empirical studies, (2) pinpointing unrequited questions, and (3) identifying future research directions. Specifically, the current review focused on (a) the impact of parental RF on the quality of caregiving and the child’s attachment security, (b) the effect of parental RF on the child’s emotion regulation and the child’s RF, (c) maternal RF in women with a history of neglect and abuse, (d) the efficacy of mentalization-based clinical interventions, and (e) the recently developed Parental Reflective Questionnaire. The following terms “maternal RF,” “paternal RF,” “parental RF,” “parental mentalization,” “maternal mentalization,” and “paternal mentalization” were searched in titles, abstracts, and main texts using Medline, Web of Science, and Scopus databases. Next, a search in Mendeley was also conducted. Inclusion criteria comprised original articles if they refer to the RF Scale (Fonagy et al., 1998) and were published in an English language, peer-reviewed journal before July, 2016. According to exclusion criteria, dissertations, qualitative or theoretical papers, and chapters in books were not taken into account. The review includes 47 studies that, taken together, supported the notion that higher parental RF was associated with adequate caregiving and the child’s attachment security, whereas low maternal RF was found in mothers whose children suffered from anxiety disorders, impairment in emotion regulation, and externalizing behaviors. In addition, higher parental RF was associated with better mentalizing abilities in children. However, unexpected findings have emerged from the most recent randomized controlled trials that tested the efficacy of mentalization-based interventions in high risk samples of mothers, raising questions about the suitability of the verbal measures in capturing the mentalizing processes at the root of the parental capacity to be adequately responsive to the child’s emotional needs.

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Section: Discussion and Direction For Future Researchmentioning

confidence: 99%

Mentalizing Makes Parenting Work: A Review about Parental Reflective Functioning and Clinical Interventions to Improve It

Camoirano¹

2017

Front. Psychol.

242

213

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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“…It is also important to consider the current findings while keeping in mind that mentalizing can involve automatic, spontaneous, and implicit or controlled, and explicit processes, each subserved by distinct patterns of neural activation (Fonagy & Luyten, 2009;Shai & Belsky, 2011b). Explicit mentalizing is typically interpreted, conscious, verbal, and reflective; it is a slow process that necessitates awareness and involves brain processing linguistic and symbolic material (Fonagy & Luyten, 2009).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Presumably, such a focus can illuminate the interface between the affective and cognitive style of actions within the realm of relational experience (Di Cesare, Di Dio, Marchi, & Rizzolatti, 2015;Di Cesare et al, 2013;Shai & Belsky, 2011a;Shai & Fonagy, 2014). Indeed, the coding of PEM draws on dance theory and movement analysis paradigms (Kestenberg-Amighi, Loman, Lewis, & Sossin, 1999;Laban, 1960;Tortora, 2006), so that movements of both the parent and the infant are examined closely in terms of the movement patterns that are displayed (i.e., tempo, use of space, direction of movement in space, muscle tone, and pacing of movement) and the degree to which the parent is able to infer the infant's mental states from movement to adjust her own movement accordingly (Shai, 2010;Shai & Belsky, 2011a, 2011bShai & Fonagy, 2014).…”

Section: Beyond Wordsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Parental embodied mentalizing: how the nonverbal dance between parents and infants predicts children’s socio-emotional functioning

Shai

Belsky

2016

Attachment & Human Development

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Parental mentalizing -the parent's ability to envision the child's mental states (such as desires, thoughts, or wishes) -has been argued to underlie a parent's ability to respond sensitively to their child's emotional needs, and thereby promote advantageous cognitive and socioemotional development. Mentalizing is typically operationalized in terms of how parents talk to or about their infants. This work extends research on mentalizing by operationalizing parental mentalizing exclusively in terms of nonverbal, bodily based, interactive behavior, namely parental embodied mentalizing(PEM). The purpose of the current research was twofold: (1) to establish the reliability and validity of the PEM coding system; and (2) to evaluate whether such measurement predicts infant and child cognitive and socio-emotional functioning. Assessing 200 mother-infant dyads at 6 months using the coding of PEM proved both reliable and valid, including predicting child attachment security at 15 and 36 months, and language abilities, academic skills, behavior problems, and social competence at 54 months, in many cases even after taking into consideration traditional measures of parenting, namely maternal sensitivity. Conceptual, empirical, and clinical implications are discussed. ARTICLE HISTORY

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“…Theories such as Eberhard-Kaechele’s developmental mirroring taxonomy ([23,24], see also Appendix B) and embodied parental mentalizing [25], show how movement and mirroring is intricately connected to cognitive achievements such as mentalization; those theories help bridge mirroring and mentalization theories, and explain how the here applied dynamic therapeutic intervention is expected to inform the social cognitive states. …”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“We Dance and Find Each Other”1: Effects of Dance/Movement Therapy on Negative Symptoms in Autism Spectrum Disorder

Hildebrandt

Koch

Fuchs

2016

Behavioral Sciences

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The treatment of deficits in social interaction, a shared symptom cluster in persons with schizophrenia (negative symptoms) and autism spectrum disorder (DSM-5 A-criterion), has so far remained widely unsuccessful in common approaches of psychotherapy. The alternative approach of embodiment brings to focus body-oriented intervention methods based on a theoretic framework that explains the disorders on a more basic level than common theory of mind approaches. The randomized controlled trial at hand investigated the effects of a 10-week manualized dance and movement therapy intervention on negative symptoms in participants with autism spectrum disorder. Although the observed effects failed to reach significance at the conventional 0.05 threshold, possibly due to an undersized sample, an encouraging trend towards stronger symptom reduction in the treatment group for overall negative symptoms and for almost all subtypes was found at the 0.10-level. Effect sizes were small but clinically meaningful, and the resulting patterns were in accordance with theoretical expectations. The study at hand contributes to finding an effective treatment approach for autism spectrum disorder in accordance with the notion of embodiment.

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When Words Just Won’t Do: Introducing Parental Embodied Mentalizing

Cited by 114 publications

References 47 publications

Mentalizing Makes Parenting Work: A Review about Parental Reflective Functioning and Clinical Interventions to Improve It

Mentalizing Makes Parenting Work: A Review about Parental Reflective Functioning and Clinical Interventions to Improve It

Parental embodied mentalizing: how the nonverbal dance between parents and infants predicts children’s socio-emotional functioning

“We Dance and Find Each Other”1: Effects of Dance/Movement Therapy on Negative Symptoms in Autism Spectrum Disorder

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