Niveles evidenciados en la tarea profesional 3

If maternal mind-mindedness is a relational construct, then it may be possible that child characteristics play a part in influencing levels of mind-mindedness. Looking at the field of attachment research once again, developmentalists have contended that an infant, specifically via their temperament, may shape or directly affect the type of secure or insecure attachment relationship that develops between themselves and their mother via the nature of the interactions between the child and mother (Belsky, Rosenberger, & Crnic, 1995). In a similar way, a mother’s capacity to engage in accurate and appropriate mind-mindedness may be influenced by a variety of child characteristics.

The age of the child included in research may be a factor which influences mothers’ levels of mind-mindedness. Studies have suggested that mothers think more about their children’s minds as they age, with an increase in mothers’ references to their children’s mental states in interactions during their second and third years (Beeghly, Bretherton, & Mervis, 1986; Dunn, Bretherton, & Munn, 1987). For example, age- related changes in a longitudinal study of mothers’ use of internal state language with children at 13, 20 and 28 months have been observed (Beeghly et al., 1986). Mothers were found to use proportionately more internal state utterances and a larger variety of internal state words with the older, more linguistically mature children. Similarly, the developmental trajectory of children’s mental activity and language capability could be seen as a potential influence on mind-mindedness both in terms of the appropriateness of mental attributes produced in descriptions and mind-related comments produced in observations.

Bernier and Dozier (2003) investigated whether mind-mindedness, assessed using the representational measure, mediated the association between foster mothers’ attachment state of mind and infant attachment security. Foster mothers were asked to describe their foster children aged between 6 and 30 months. The authors

pointed out that during the course of the second and third years of life, children’s mental activity may become more readily observable due to the developmental course of language and the emergence of symbolic play. This led to the proposal that it might not be appropriate to focus on a child’s mental attributes before the age of 3 and that doing so might be negatively related to security of attachment. A negative relationship was indeed found between mothers’ tendency to use mental attributes and the security of both the mothers’ attachment state of mind and their infants’ attachment. As an explanation for this finding, which at first appears

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counterintuitive, it was suggested that when mothers described young children with a higher number of mental attributes, it might correspond with the mothers being less attuned to their child, reducing the likelihood of a secure attachment

relationship. Consequently, the authors suggested that a key element of mind- mindedness, assessed using the representational measure, is whether descriptions of the child are age-appropriate.

A child factor which has been included as a control variable in mind-mindedness research is gender. Gender has been found to be associated with differences in adults’ attributions and mother-child conversations with daughters and sons. Firstly, gender has been shown to affect adults’ attributions of emotions to children. In a classic study by Condry and Condry (1976) where adults labelled infants’ emotions, a video was shown of an infant reacting to a Jack-in-the-box, and more anger and less fear was attributed to the child labelled as a boy than the same child labelled as a girl. Secondly, parents have been found to talk about emotions differently to boys and girls and are generally more likely to speak about emotions with daughters than sons (Cervantes & Callanan, 1998; Kuebli & Fivush, 1992). For example, gender differences have been found in the content of conversations about the emotional aspects of past experiences with 30–35-month-old children in mother-daughter and mother-son dyads (Fivush, 1989). Mothers were found to focus more on positive emotions with daughters and tended not to attribute negative emotions to the child whereas with sons, positive and negative emotions were discussed equally.

It is possible that whether a mother is talking about or interacting with her son or her daughter may have an impact on maternal mind-mindedness. A lack of gender effect on maternal mind-mindedness in infant-mother interactions has been found in some studies (Demers, Bernier, Tarabulsy, & Provost, 2010a; Meins et al., 2011, 2013; Walker et al., 2011). This null finding is not universal because gender of child differences have been shown in a study by Lok and McMahon (2006) which found that mothers of female children used a higher proportion of mental attributes when describing their children than mothers of male children. If gender of child affects levels of maternal mind-mindedness, this might imply that mind-mindedness is influenced by relational factors, in particular whether the mother is talking about or interacting with a son or daughter.

Some studies have looked at the possibility that individual differences in infants correlate with maternal mind-mindedness though so far little evidence has been

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found in support of this supposition. Research has shown that maternal mind- mindedness appears to be unrelated to child-centred variables such as concurrent infant behaviour (Meins et al., 2001), and cognitive ability based on standardised scales in infancy (Meins et al., 2001) as well as verbal IQ at age 4 (Meins et al., 2002). Existing research led Meins et al. (2011) to state that there was little support for infant characteristics being related to mind-mindedness, for example that

mothers would be more mind-minded because their infants were more socially engaging, interactive and cognitively able. The authors argued, however, that it could be viewed as too soon to state that mind-mindedness is not influenced by child characteristics based on the rather specific infant behaviours monitored in a laboratory or how a child performs on a standardised IQ test.

Meins et al. (2011) suggested that perhaps more generalised characteristics, in particular infants’ temperamental tendencies, may be more related to mothers’ proclivity to make appropriate comments regarding their infants’ internal states and to misread their thoughts and feelings. Temperamental tendencies may be more likely to be linked to levels of mind-mindedness than other child factors if, for example, a child consistently shows a certain type of emotional response, then a mother may be more likely to comment appropriately on the corresponding internal state. Accordingly, this thesis investigates potential contributions of children’s temperament to maternal mind-mindedness. Existing research exploring links between maternal mind-mindedness and infants’ temperament, and the

development of an observational measure looking at temperament with preschool and primary school children will be examined in Chapter 7.

3.7 Summary

It is unclear from the existing literature whether maternal mind-mindedness is a cognitive-behavioural trait, a relational construct dependent on specific mother-child relationships or perhaps both. If a cognitive-behavioural trait, mind-mindedness should be stable over time and generalisable across relationships. Research into whether mind-mindedness shows temporal continuity has been limited by different mind-mindedness measures being used across time, hampering convergent validity, or by the same measure being used longitudinally but with only a short time period between observations. Also, existing research has investigated maternal mind- mindedness in relation to only one child per mother so it has not been possible to investigate whether mind-mindedness generalises across relationships – in other words whether a mother’s mind-mindedness level is similar with different children.

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There is conflicting evidence concerning whether mother and child factors are related to mind-mindedness but promising factors, specifically mothers’ psychological mindedness and children’s temperament will be investigated as potential correlates in this thesis.