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Does Children’s Mentalizing Mediate the Role of Attachment and Psychological Maladjustment in Middle Childhood?

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Abstract

Objectives

This study investigated mentalization, operationalized as Reflective Functioning (RF), focusing on its differential subcomponents (self- and other-focused RF). The interplay between RF, attachment, and psychological maladjustment (operationalized as internalizing and externalizing problems) was examined during middle childhood in the service of forging a better understanding of the mentalizing framework.

Methods

A community sample of Italian children aged 8–12 years (N = 96; Mage = 10.41 years, SD = 1.43 years) completed in an individual session the Child Attachment Interview, which later was coded for overall attachment coherence and RF by two separate teams of raters, and verbal comprehension subtests of the WISC-IV. Mothers completed the Child Behavior Checklist, comprising our measure of children’s internalizing and externalizing problems.

Results

Analyses showed that self-focused RF and other-focused RF together mediated the relation between attachment coherence and externalizing problems; further, only self-focused RF mediated the link between attachment coherence and internalizing problems.

Conclusions

These findings contribute to theory and provide potential directions for intervention. Specifically, the findings may imply that targeting children’s self-focused RF as an area of intervention may be more profitable in select psychological problems whereas in other cases it may be more useful to consider mentalizing in its totality. Possible mechanisms underlying these findings are discussed.

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Acknowledgements

We wish to express our special gratitude toward participants for their involvement in the study and interns for their help with data collection. We are also grateful to Rosetta Castellano for her contribution to the coding of the CAI.

Author Contributions

B.F. and C.M.S. designed the study, conducted data analyses, and drafted the paper. B.J. collaborated on the writing of the paper. C.D. and E.K. collaborated on the conceptualization of the research problem.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Educational Science (DISFOR), Genoa, Italy

    Bizzi Fabiola, Charpentier Mora Simone & Cavanna Donatella

  2. Department of School of Psychology, University of Laval, Quebec City, QC, Canada

    Ensink Karin

  3. Department of Psychology and Social Behavior, University of California, Irvine, CA, USA

    Borelli Jessica

Authors
  1. Bizzi Fabiola
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  2. Charpentier Mora Simone
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  3. Ensink Karin
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  4. Cavanna Donatella
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  5. Borelli Jessica
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Correspondence to Bizzi Fabiola.

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All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee of the University of Genoa and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards.

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Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study. Parents completed consent forms, and children completed assent forms.

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Fabiola, B., Simone, C.M., Karin, E. et al. Does Children’s Mentalizing Mediate the Role of Attachment and Psychological Maladjustment in Middle Childhood?. J Child Fam Stud 29, 1793–1803 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10826-020-01701-9

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