Trust me! : Parental Embodied Mentalizing Predicts Infant Cognitive and Language Development in Longitudinal Follow-up

• In Event: Shaping the Parent-Infant Relationship: Unique and Complementary Roles Played by Verbal and Non-Verbal Parental Mentalizing

Abstract

Children’s cognitive and language development is a central aspect of human development and has wide and long-standing impact. The parent-infant relationship is the chief arena for the infant to learn about the world. Studies reveal associations between quality of parental care and children’s cognitive and language development when the former is measured as maternal sensitivity (e.g., NICHD Early Childcare Network, 2000). Nonetheless, the extent to which parental mentalizing – a parent’s understanding of the thoughts, feelings, and attitudes of a child, and presumed to underlie sensitivity –contributes to children’s cognitive development and functioning, has yet to be thoroughly investigated. According to the epistemic trust theory, high mentalizing parents often use ostensive cues, which signal to the infant that they are perceived and treated as unique subjective beings. By doing so, parents foster epistemic trust in their infants, allowing the infant to use the parents a reliable source of knowledge to learn from (e.g., Fonagy et al, 2015). Until recently, parental mentalizing has been limited to verbal approaches and measurement. This is a substantial limitation of the construct as we know that understanding of intentionality is both nonverbal and verbal. In this investigation we employed both verbal (i.e., parental reflective functioning) and non-verbal body-based (i.e., parental embodied mentalizing, PEM) approaches to parental mentalizing, to examine whether parental mentalizing in a clinical sample predicts children’s cognitive and language development 12 months later. This longitudinal intervention study included 39 mothers experiencing high levels of social adversity and maternal mental health problems and their infants. Findings revealed that PEM in infancy significantly predicted language development 12 months later and marginally predicted child cognitive development. Importantly, PEM explained unique variance in the child’s cognitive and linguistic capacities over and above maternal emotional availability, child interactive behavior, parental reflective functioning, depression, ethnicity, education, marital status, and number of other children.

Authors

• Dana Shai, IDC Herzliya, Israel
  Presenting Author

• Rose Spencer

• Michelle Sleed

• Tobias Nolte

• Peter Fonagy, University College London