Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

Mentalizing in Infancy and Early Childhood

  • Chapter
  • First Online:
WAIMH Handbook of Infant and Early Childhood Mental Health

  • 241 Accesses

Abstract

This chapter explains the role of mentalizing in infant development, describing how the emergence of an agentive self is associated with the acquisition of the capacity to mentalize. Mentalizing caregivers respond with contingent and marked affective displays of their own experience in response to the child’s subjective experience, thus enabling the child to develop second-order representations of their own subjective experiences. It is further argued that the development of mentalizing also primes the infant to adopt a stance of epistemic trust and openness to cultural learning, one of the foundations of salutogenic social functioning.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Log in via an institution
Chapter
USD 29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD 189.00
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as EPUB and PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Hardcover Book
USD 249.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Durable hardcover edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

References

  • Altınok, N., Hernik, M., Király, I., & Gergely, G. (2020). Acquiring sub-efficient and efficient variants of novel means by integrating information from multiple social models in preschoolers. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 195, 104847.

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Apperly, I. (2021). The cognitive basis of mindreading. In M. Gilead & K. Ochsner (Eds.), The neural basis of mentalizing (pp. 371–384). Springer.

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  • Bakermans-Kranenburg, M. J., van IJzendoorn, M. H., & Juffer, F. (2003). Less is more: Meta-analyses of sensitivity and attachment interventions in early childhood. Psychological Bulletin, 129(2), 195–215.

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Baradon, T., & Campbell, C. (2022). Psychoanalytic parent-infant psychotherapy and mentalization: A dialogue in theory and practice. Routledge.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Barlow, J., Sleed, M., & Midgley, N. (2021). Enhancing parental reflective functioning through early dyadic interventions: A systematic review and meta-analysis. Infant Mental Health Journal, 42(1), 21–34.

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Bateman, A., Campbell, C., Luyten, P., & Fonagy, P. (2018). A mentalization-based approach to common factors in the treatment of borderline personality disorder. Current Opinion in Psychology, 21, 44–49.

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Beeney, J. E., Hallquist, M. N., Ellison, W. D., & Levy, K. N. (2016). Self-other disturbance in borderline personality disorder: Neural, self-report, and performance-based evidence. Personality Disorders, 7(1), 28–39.

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Bernier, A., McMahon, C. A., & Perrier, R. (2017). Maternal mind-mindedness and children’s school readiness: A longitudinal study of developmental processes. Developmental Psychology, 53(2), 210–221.

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Berthelot, N., Ensink, K., Bernazzani, O., Normandin, L., Luyten, P., & Fonagy, P. (2015). Intergenerational transmission of attachment in abused and neglected mothers: The role of trauma-specific reflective functioning. Infant Mental Health Journal, 36(2), 200–212.

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Borelli, J. L., Cohen, C., Pettit, C., Normandin, L., Target, M., Fonagy, P., & Ensink, K. (2019). Maternal and child sexual abuse history: An intergenerational exploration of children’s adjustment and maternal trauma-reflective functioning. Frontiers in Psychology, 10, 1062.

    Article  PubMed  PubMed Central  Google Scholar 

  • Byrne, G., Sleed, M., Midgley, N., Fearon, P., Mein, C., Bateman, A., & Fonagy, P. (2019). Lighthouse Parenting Programme: Description and pilot evaluation of mentalization-based treatment to address child maltreatment. Clinical Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 24(4), 680–693.

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Byrne, G., Murphy, S., & Connon, G. (2020). Mentalization-based treatments with children and families: A systematic review of the literature. Clinical Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 25(4), 1022–1048.

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Cassidy, J., Brett, B. E., Gross, J. T., Stern, J. A., Martin, D. R., Mohr, J. J., & Woodhouse, S. S. (2017). Circle of Security-Parenting: A randomized controlled trial in Head Start. Development and Psychopathology, 29(2), 651–673.

    Article  PubMed  PubMed Central  Google Scholar 

  • Choi-Kain, L. W., & Gunderson, J. G. (2008). Mentalization: Ontogeny, assessment, and application in the treatment of borderline personality disorder. American Journal of Psychiatry, 165(9), 1127–1135.

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Clay, Z., & Tennie, C. (2018). Is overimitation a uniquely human phenomenon? Insights from human children as compared to bonobos. Child Development, 89(5), 1535–1544.

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Cohen, N. J., Lojkasek, M., Muir, E., Muir, R., & Parker, C. J. (2002). Six-month follow-up of two mother–infant psychotherapies: Convergence of therapeutic outcomes. Infant Mental Health Journal, 23(4), 361–380.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Csibra, G., & Gergely, G. (2006). Social learning and social cognition: The case for pedagogy. In M. H. Johnson & Y. Munakata (Eds.), Processes of change in brain and cognitive development. Attention and performance XXI (pp. 249–274). Oxford University Press.

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  • Csibra, G., & Gergely, G. (2009). Natural pedagogy. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 13(4), 148–153.

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Csibra, G., & Gergely, G. (2011). Natural pedagogy as evolutionary adaptation. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological Sciences, 366(1567), 1149–1157.

    Article  PubMed  PubMed Central  Google Scholar 

  • Cuff, B. M. P., Brown, S. J., Taylor, L., & Howat, D. (2016). Empathy: A review of the concept. Emotion Review, 8(2), 144–153.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Damasio, A. (2010). Self comes to mind: Constructing the conscious brain. Pantheon Books.

    Google Scholar 

  • Debbané, M., Salaminios, G., Luyten, P., Badoud, D., Armando, M., Solida Tozzi, A., et al. (2016). Attachment, neurobiology, and mentalizing along the psychosis continuum. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 10, 406.

    Article  PubMed  PubMed Central  Google Scholar 

  • Decety, J., & Cacioppo, S. (2012). The speed of morality: A high-density electrical neuroimaging study. Journal of Neurophysiology, 108(11), 3068–3072.

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Ensink, K., Begin, M., Normandin, L., & Fonagy, P. (2017). Parental reflective functioning as a moderator of child internalizing difficulties in the context of child sexual abuse. Psychiatry Research, 257, 361–366.

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Espinosa, L., Golkar, A., & Olsson, A. (2021). Mentalizing in value-based vicarious learning. In M. Gilead & K. Ochsner (Eds.), The neural basis of mentalizing (pp. 517–536). Springer.

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  • Fehlbaum, L. V., Borbas, R., Paul, K., Eickhoff, S. B., & Raschle, N. M. (2022). Early and late neural correlates of mentalizing: ALE meta-analyses in adults, children and adolescents. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 17(4), 351–366.

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Feldman, R. (2021). Social behavior as a transdiagnostic marker of resilience. Annual Review of Clinical Psychology, 17, 153.

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Flynn, E., & Smith, K. (2012). Investigating the mechanisms of cultural acquisition: How pervasive is overimitation in adults? Social Psychology of Education, 43, 185–195.

    Google Scholar 

  • Foley, S., Hughes, C., & Fink, E. (2022). Expectant mothers’ not fathers’ mind-mindedness predicts infant, mother, and father conversational turns at 7 months. Infancy, 27(6), 1091–1103.

    Article  PubMed  PubMed Central  Google Scholar 

  • Foley, S., Devine, R. T., & Hughes, C. (2023). Mind-mindedness in new mothers and fathers: Stability and discontinuity from pregnancy to toddlerhood. Developmental Psychology, 59(1), 128–140.

    Google Scholar 

  • Fonagy, P., & Campbell, C. (2017). What touch can communicate: A commentary on mentalizing homeostasis. Neuropsychoanalysis, 19(1), 39–42.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Fonagy, P., Steele, H., & Steele, M. (1991). Maternal representations of attachment during pregnancy predict the organization of infant-mother attachment at one year of age. Child Development, 62(5), 891–905.

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Fonagy, P., Gergely, G., Jurist, E., & Target, M. (2002). Affect regulation, mentalization, and the development of the self. Other Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Fonagy, P., Luyten, P., & Allison, E. (2015). Epistemic petrification and the restoration of epistemic trust: A new conceptualization of borderline personality disorder and its psychosocial treatment. Journal of Personality Disorders, 29(5), 575–609.

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Fonagy, P., Sleed, M., & Baradon, T. (2016). Randomized control trial of Parent-Infant Psychotherapy for parents with mental health problems and young infants. Infant Mental Health Journal, 37(2), 97–114.

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Fonagy, P., Luyten, P., Allison, E., & Campbell, C. (2017a). What we have changed our minds about: Part 1. Borderline personality disorder as a limitation of resilience. Borderline Personality Disorder and Emotion Dysregulation, 4, 11.

    Article  PubMed  PubMed Central  Google Scholar 

  • Fonagy, P., Luyten, P., Allison, E., & Campbell, C. (2017b). What we have changed our minds about: Part 2. Borderline personality disorder, epistemic trust and the developmental significance of social communication. Borderline Personality Disorder and Emotion Dysregulation, 4, 9.

    Article  PubMed  PubMed Central  Google Scholar 

  • Fonagy, P., Campbell, C., Constantinou, M., Higgitt, A., Allison, E., & Luyten, P. (2021). Culture and psychopathology: An attempt at reconsidering the role of social learning. Development and Psychopathology, 34, 1205–1220.

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Gagné, K., Lemelin, J., & Tarabulsy, G. (2021). Non-verbal and verbal parental mentalization as predictors of infant attachment security: Contributions of parental embodied mentalizing and mind-mindedness and the mediating role of maternal sensitivity. Infant Behavior and Development, 65, 101622.

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Gerace, A., Day, A., Casey, S., & Mohr, P. (2017). ‘I think you think’: Understanding the importance of self-reflection to the taking of another person’s perspective. Journal of Relationships Research, 8, e9.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Gergely, G., & Watson, J. S. (1996). The social biofeedback theory of parental affect-mirroring: The development of emotional self-awareness and self-control in infancy. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 77(6), 1181–1212.

    PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Gilead, M., & Ochsner, K. N. (Eds.). (2021). The neural basis of mentalizing. Springer Nature.

    Google Scholar 

  • Golkar, A., & Olsson, A. (2017). The interplay of social group biases in social threat learning. Scientific Reports, 7, 7685.

    Article  PubMed  PubMed Central  Google Scholar 

  • Golkar, A., Castro, V., & Olsson, A. (2015). Social learning of fear and safety is determined by the demonstrator’s racial group. Biology Letters, 11(1), 20140817.

    Article  PubMed  PubMed Central  Google Scholar 

  • Gruber, T., Deschenaux, A., Frick, A., & Clement, F. (2019). Group membership influences more social identification than social learning or Overimitation in children. Child Development, 90(3), 728–745.

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Hoehl, S., Keupp, S., Schleihauf, H., McGuigan, N., Buttelmann, D., & Whiten, A. (2019). ‘Over-imitation’: A review and appraisal of a decade of research. Developmental Review, 51, 90–108.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Huang, C.-T., Heyes, C., & Charman, T. (2006). Preschoolers’ behavioural reenactment of “failed attempts”: The roles of intention-reading, emulation and mimicry. Cognitive Development, 21, 36–45.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Hughes, C., Aldercotte, A., & Foley, S. (2017). Maternal mind-mindedness provides a buffer for pre-adolescents at risk for disruptive behavior. Journal of Abnormal Child Psychology, 45(2), 225–235.

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Juffer, F., Bakermans-Kranenburg, M. J., & Van IJzendoorn, M. H. (2017). Video-feedback intervention to promote positive parenting and sensitive discipline (VIPP-SD): Development and meta-analytical evidence of its effectiveness. In H. Steele & M. Steele (Eds.), Handbook of attachment-based interventions (pp. 1–26). Guilford Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Kovacs, A. M., Teglas, E., & Endress, A. D. (2010). The social sense: Susceptibility to others’ beliefs in human infants and adults. Science, 330(6012), 1830–1834.

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Lieberman, M. D. (2007). Social cognitive neuroscience: A review of core processes. Annual Review of Psychology, 58, 259–289.

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Longhi, E., Murray, L., Hunter, R., Wellsted, D., Taylor-Colls, S., MacKenzie, K., et al. (2016). The NSPCC UK Minding the Baby® (MTB) home-visiting programme, supporting young mothers (aged 14-25) in the first 2 years of their baby’s life: Study protocol for a randomised controlled trial. Trials, 17, 486.

    Article  PubMed  PubMed Central  Google Scholar 

  • Luyten, P., & Fonagy, P. (2019). Mentalizing and trauma. In A. Bateman & P. Fonagy (Eds.), Handbook of mentalizing in mental health practice (2nd ed., pp. 79–99). American Psychiatric Publishing.

    Google Scholar 

  • Luyten, P., Campbell, C., Allison, E., & Fonagy, P. (2020a). The mentalizing approach to psychopathology: State of the art and future directions. Annual Review of Clinical Psychology, 16, 297–325.

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Luyten, P., Campbell, C., & Fonagy, P. (2020b). Borderline personality disorder, complex trauma, and problems with self and identity: A social-communicative approach. Journal of Personality, 88(1), 88–105.

    Google Scholar 

  • Lyons, D. E., Damrosch, D. H., Lin, J. K., Macris, D. M., & Keil, F. C. (2011). The scope and limits of overimitation in the transmission of artefact culture. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B: Biological Sciences, 366(1567), 1158–1167.

    Article  PubMed  PubMed Central  Google Scholar 

  • Malle, B. F. (2021). The tree of social cognition: Hierarchically organized capacities of mentalizing. In M. Gilead & K. Ochsner (Eds.), The neural basis of mentalizing (pp. 337–370). Springer.

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  • Malle, B. F., & Holbrook, J. (2012). Is there a hierarchy of social inferences? The likelihood and speed of inferring intentionality, mind, and personality. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 102(4), 661–684.

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Maresh, E. L., & Andrews-Hanna, J. R. (2021). Putting the “Me” in “Mentalizing”: Multiple constructs describing self versus other during mentalizing and implications for social anxiety disorder. In M. Gilead & K. Ochsner (Eds.), The neural basis of mentalizing (pp. 629–658). Springer.

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  • Marsh, L. E., Ropar, D., & Hamilton, A. F. C. (2019). Are you watching me? The role of audience and object novelty in overimitation. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 180, 123–130.

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Mayes, L. C. (2006). Arousal regulation, emotional flexibility, medial amygdala function, and the impact of early experience: Comments on the paper of Lewis et al. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1094, 178–192.

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Morelli, S. A., Torre, J. B., & Eisenberger, N. I. (2014). The neural bases of feeling understood and not understood. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 9(12), 1890–1896.

    Article  PubMed  PubMed Central  Google Scholar 

  • Mortensen, J. A., & Mastergeorge, A. M. (2014). A meta-analytic review of relationship-based interventions for low-income families with infants and toddlers: Facilitating supportive parent-child interactions. Infant Mental Health Journal, 35(4), 336–353.

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Nicolaou, S., Goldberg, S., Michael, K., & Berenson, K. (2023). Responses to validating versus reframing support strategies as a function of borderline personality features and interpersonal problems. Cogent Psychology, 10(1), 2146280.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Nielsen, M. (2018). The social glue of cumulative culture and ritual behavior. Child Development Perspectives, 12, 264–268.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • O’Farrelly, C., Watt, H., Babalis, D., Bakermans-Kranenburg, M. J., Barker, B., Byford, S., et al. (2021). A brief home-based parenting intervention to reduce behavior problems in young children: A pragmatic randomized clinical trial. JAMA Pediatrics, 175(6), 567–576.

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • O’Hara, L., Smith, E. R., Barlow, J., Livingstone, N., Herath, N. I. N. S., Wei, Y., et al. (2019). Video feedback for parental sensitivity and attachment security in children under five years. Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews, 11, CD012348. https://doi.org/10.1002/14651858.CD012348.pub2

    PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Olsson, A., McMahon, K., Papenberg, G., Zaki, J., Bolger, N., & Ochsner, K. N. (2016). Vicarious fear learning depends on empathic appraisals and trait empathy. Psychological Science, 27(1), 25–33.

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Oosterwijk, S., Snoek, L., Rotteveel, M., Barrett, L. F., & Scholte, H. S. (2017). Shared states: Using MVPA to test neural overlap between self-focused emotion imagery and other-focused emotion understanding. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 12(7), 1025–1035.

    Article  PubMed  PubMed Central  Google Scholar 

  • Pan, Y., Novembre, G., Song, B., Li, X., & Hu, Y. (2018). Interpersonal synchronization of inferior frontal cortices tracks social interactive learning of a song. NeuroImage, 183, 280–290.

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Parkinson, C., Kleinbaum, A. M., & Wheatley, T. (2018). Similar neural responses predict friendship. Nature Communications, 9, 332.

    Article  PubMed  PubMed Central  Google Scholar 

  • Parnamets, P., Espinosa, L., & Olsson, A. (2020). Physiological synchrony predicts observational threat learning in humans. Proceedings of the Biological Sciences, 287(1927), 20192779.

    Google Scholar 

  • Risholm Mothander, P., Furmark, C., & Neander, K. (2018). Adding “Circle of security – Parenting” to treatment as usual in three Swedish infant mental health clinics. Effects on parents’ internal representations and quality of parent-infant interaction. Scandinavian Journal of Psychology, 59(3), 262–272.

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Rosso, A. M., & Airaldi, C. (2016). Intergenerational transmission of reflective functioning. Frontiers in Psychology, 7, 1903.

    Article  PubMed  PubMed Central  Google Scholar 

  • Rossouw, T. I., & Fonagy, P. (2012). Mentalization-based treatment for self-harm in adolescents: A randomized controlled trial. Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, 51(12), 1304–1313.

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Sabbagh, M. A. (2004). Understanding orbitofrontal contributions to theory-of-mind reasoning: Implications for autism. Brain and Cognition, 55(1), 209–219.

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Sadler, L. S., Slade, A., Close, N., Webb, D. L., Simpson, T., Fennie, K., & Mayes, L. C. (2013). Minding the Baby: Enhancing reflectiveness to improve early health and relationship outcomes in an interdisciplinary home visiting program. Infant Mental Health Journal, 34(5), 391–405.

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Saxe, R. (2015). The happiness of the fish: Evidence for a common theory of one’s own and others’ actions. In K. D. Markman, W. M. P. Klein, & J. A. Suhr (Eds.), Handbook of imagination and mental simulation (pp. 257–265). Psychology Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Shai, D., & Belsky, J. (2011a). Parental embodied mentalizing: Let’s be explicit about what we mean by implicit. Child Development Perspectives, 5(3), 187–188.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Shai, D., & Belsky, J. (2011b). When words just won’t do: Introducing parental embodied mentalizing. Child Development Perspectives, 5(3), 173–180.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Shai, D., & Fonagy, P. (2013). Beyond words: Parental embodied mentalizing and the parent–infant dance. In M. Mikulincer & P. R. Shaver (Eds.), Mechanisms of social connection from brain to group (pp. 185–203). American Psychological Association.

    Google Scholar 

  • Shai, D., & Meins, E. (2018). Parental embodied mentalizing and its relation to mind-mindedness, sensitivity, and attachment security. Infancy, 23(6), 857–872.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Shai, D., Laor Black, A., Spencer, R., Sleed, M., Baradon, T., Nolte, T., & Fonagy, P. (2022). Trust me! Parental embodied mentalizing predicts infant cognitive and language development in longitudinal follow-up. Frontiers in Psychology, 13, 867134.

    Article  PubMed  PubMed Central  Google Scholar 

  • Slade, A., Aber, J. L., Berger, B., Bresgi, I., & Kaplan, M. (2004). The Parent Development Interview – Revised. The City University of New York.

    Google Scholar 

  • Slade, A., Holland, M. L., Ordway, M. R., Carlson, E. A., Jeon, S., Close, N., et al. (2020). Minding the Baby®: Enhancing parental reflective functioning and infant attachment in an attachment-based, interdisciplinary home visiting program. Development and Psychopathology, 32(1), 123–137.

    Google Scholar 

  • Sleed, M., Baradon, T., & Fonagy, P. (2013). New Beginnings for mothers and babies in prison: A cluster randomized controlled trial. Attachment and Human Development, 15(4), 349–367.

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Sperber, D., Clement, F., Heintz, C., Mascaro, O., Mercier, H., Origgi, G., & Wilson, D. (2010). Epistemic vigilance. Mind and Language, 25(4), 359–393.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Steele, H., Perez, A., Segal, F., & Steele, M. (2016). Maternal Adult Attachment Interview (AAI) collected during pregnancy predicts reflective functioning in AAIs from their first-born children 17 years later. International Journal of Developmental Science, 10(3–4), 117–124.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Suchman, N. E., DeCoste, C., Leigh, D., & Borelli, J. (2010). Reflective functioning in mothers with drug use disorders: Implications for dyadic interactions with infants and toddlers. Attachment and Human Development, 12(6), 567–585.

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Suchman, N. E., DeCoste, C. L., McMahon, T. J., Dalton, R., Mayes, L. C., & Borelli, J. (2017). Mothering From the Inside Out: Results of a second randomized clinical trial testing a mentalization-based intervention for mothers in addiction treatment. Development and Psychopathology, 29(2), 617–636.

    Article  PubMed  PubMed Central  Google Scholar 

  • Tan, K. M., Daitch, A. L., Pinheiro-Chagas, P., Fox, K. C. R., Parvizi, J., & Lieberman, M. D. (2022). Electrocorticographic evidence of a common neurocognitive sequence for mentalizing about the self and others. Nature Communications, 13, 1919.

    Google Scholar 

  • Tomasello, M. (2019). Becoming human: A theory of ontogeny. The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Van Overwalle, F., & Heleven, E. (2021). The neural basis and representation of social attributions. In M. Gilead & K. Ochsner (Eds.), The neural basis of Mentalizing (pp. 385–498). Springer.

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  • Varela, F. J., Thompson, E., & Rosch, E. (2017). The embodied mind: Cognitive science and human experience. MIT Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Winnicott, D. W. (1962). Ego integration in child development. In D. W. Winnicott (Ed.), The maturational processes and the facilitating environment (pp. 56–63). Hogarth Press, 1965.

    Google Scholar 

  • Yatziv, T., Gueron-Sela, N., Meiri, G., Marks, K., & Atzaba-Poria, N. (2018). Maternal mentalization and behavior under stressful contexts: The moderating roles of prematurity and household chaos. Infancy, 23(4), 591–615.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Zeegers, M., Colonnesi, C., Stams, G., & Meins, E. (2017). Mind matters: A meta-analysis on parental mentalization and sensitivity as predictors of infant-parent attachment. Psychological Bulletin, 143(12), 1245–1272.

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

Download references

Acknowledgments

Peter Fonagy is in part supported by the NIHR Applied Research Collaboration (ARC) North Thames at Barts Health NHS Trust. The views expressed are those of the author(s) and not necessarily those of the NIHR or the Department of Health and Social Care.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Research Department of Clinical, Educational and Health Psychology, University College London, London, UK

    Chloe Campbell, Patrick Luyten, Elizabeth Allison & Peter Fonagy

  2. Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences, KU Leuven, Leuven, Belgium

    Patrick Luyten

Authors
  1. Chloe Campbell
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. Patrick Luyten
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  3. Elizabeth Allison
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  4. Peter Fonagy
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Patrick Luyten .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Departments of Pediatrics and Psychiatry, Louisiana State University Health Sciences Center, New Orleans, LA, USA

    Joy D. Osofsky

  2. Department of Psychology, Michigan State University, DeWitt, MI, USA

    Hiram E. Fitzgerald

  3. Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at the Bar Ilan University Azrieli Medical School, Safed, Israel

    Miri Keren

  4. Department of Child Psychiatry, Faculty of Medicine and Health Technology, Tampere University, Tampere, Finland

    Kaija Puura

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2024 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG

About this chapter

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this chapter

Campbell, C., Luyten, P., Allison, E., Fonagy, P. (2024). Mentalizing in Infancy and Early Childhood. In: Osofsky, J.D., Fitzgerald, H.E., Keren, M., Puura, K. (eds) WAIMH Handbook of Infant and Early Childhood Mental Health. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-48627-2_23

Download citation

Publish with us

Policies and ethics

Search

Navigation