Poster #214 - The Costs and Benefits of Over-Mentalizing in Middle Childhood

• In Event: 3-053 - Poster Session 10
  In Poster Session: PS 10 Section - Social, Emotional, Personality

Integrative Statement

Theory of mind (ToM) is the ability to decode and reason about the beliefs, desires, intentions, and emotions of others (Wellman, 1990). Mentalization refers specifically to the reasoning portion of ToM (Fonagy et al., 1991). Across development, there are clear benefits, but also potential costs, associated with advanced mentalizing abilities. For example, understanding others’ mental states is thought to promote children’s language development (De Villiers, 2007). Yet in adults, excessive mentalization (or the tendency to go beyond given cues to ascribe more elaborative mental processes to others) is associated with internalizing disorders such as social anxiety (SA; Washburn et al., 2014). The goal of this study is to bring these literatures together to examine both language and social/emotional correlates of mentalizing in children. It is hypothesized that greater mental state reasoning will be positively correlated with both social anxiety and more advanced language abilities.
Children were recruited as part of an ongoing short-term longitudinal study with 91 children assessed at 7 years (M = 7.31, SD = 0.30, 46 female) and, to-date, 44 children at 8 years (M = 8.41, SD = .30, 23 female; projected n of 84 at completion). At 7, children completed the Reading the Mind in the Eyes child version task (RME-C; Baron-Cohen et al., 1990) to assess ToM identification, and the Reading the Mind in Film child version task (RMF-C; Golan et al., 2008), to assess mentalizing. Children are presented with six socio-emotional video vignettes and asked to identify the emotion displayed. To assess children’s ToM reasoning skills, children were asked, “Why do you think that they are feeling that way?” following each video. Responses were videotaped and coded using Mangold INTERACT software, with responses coded as: under-mentalizing (limited interpretation); correct (appropriate); or over-mentalizing (excessive interpretation). SA was assessed using the self-report Screen for Child Anxiety Related Disorders (Birmaher et al., 1999). At 8, children completed the Expressive and Pragmatic language subscales of the Comprehensive Assessment of Spoken Language, Second Edition (Carrow-Woolfolk, 2017). Receptive vocabulary was assessed using the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test (Dunn, 1981).
Preliminary results reveal that at 7, self-reported SA was positively correlated with the number of over-mentalizing responses children provided, r(74)= .267, p= .021. ToM identification on the Eyes Task at age 7 was unrelated concurrent SA and language performance at age 8. In contrast, over-mentalizing on the Film task predicted higher pragmatic language skills at age 8, r(30)=.457, p=.011. There were no associations between 7-year over-mentalization and the other measures of language at 8-years.
These results suggest that advanced reasoning, but not simple decoding, of mental states is associated with both costs and benefits in children. Consistent with adult findings, elaborative mentalizing, was associated with higher concurrent SA, but also better pragmatic language skills one year later. These findings suggest that engaging in elaborative processing of others’ mental states may increase children’s awareness of social rules but also make one excessively concerned about others’ opinions. Discussion will focus on the need for longitudinal studies to tease apart directions of effects.

Authors

• Emma Green, University of Waterloo
  Presenting Author

• Nina N Gabert, University of Waterloo
  Non-Presenting Author

• Heather Henderson, Department of Psychology, University of Waterloo
  Non-Presenting Author