Poster #66 - “You Wanna Put the Sock in Your Mouth?” Parents’ Mentalization Language and Relations with Infant Behavioral Regulation

• In Event: Poster Session 02

Abstract

Behavioral and emotional regulation emerge alongside other executive functions in the first year of life and robustly predict later self-organization, social-emotional competency, and academic achievement (Morrison et al., 2010). Parents’ use of mentalization language, language referring to internal states, is associated with more advanced emotion regulation skills in school-aged children (Álvarez, 2022). Nevertheless, existing research on parents’ mentalization language input has predominantly focused on toddlers and preschoolers (Laranjo et al., 2010) and it remains unclear whether and how parents discuss mental states with infants. Further, our understanding of how parental communicative input contributes to emotional regulation remains limited. In the present study, we aim to achieve a more granular understanding of mentalization language input across the first year of life by closely examining language referring to the parental mental states versus child mental states in various conversational contexts. We also investigate how each type of mentalization language relates to emotion regulation as measured by the Infant Behavior Questionnaire Revised Shortform (IBQ; Gartstein & Rothbart, 2003).
Twenty-five families with children aged 6 or 12 months (n_6months = 16, n_12months = 9) were recruited from a Northeastern US city. Dyads were asked to play as they normally would without toys (“the Toyless Play Task”) and then with toys (“the Toy Play Task”). After 8 minutes, an experimenter introduced a pre-recorded video describing the remainder of the lab visit on a tablet, and parents watched the video while attending to their infant (“the Divided Attention Task”). The divided attention task mimics a real-life situation where various activities compete for parents’ attention, hence capturing ecologically valid data of parents’ interaction with infants while distracted. Interactions were recorded and later transcribed verbatim using Codes for the Analysis of Human Language (CHAT) conventions from the Child Language Data Exchange System (MacWhinney, 2000). Transcripts were reliably coded for mentalization language, Cohen’s Kappas > 0.7, including language discussing the child’s; the parent’s; both the child and parent’s; and a third party’s mental state. Children’s emotional regulation was measured using the Infant Behavior Questionnaire Revised Shortform Orienting/Regulation subscale, which measures constructs including Duration of Orienting and Soothability.
The findings indicate that parents already use rich mentalization language with 6-month-olds (descriptive statistics see Figure 1), with the majority of mentalization utterances referring to the child. Parents used a similar number of mentalization utterances at 6 and 12 months, p > .05. We also found substantial individual differences in parents’ use of mentalization language at both 6 and 12 months. There was not a significant association between mentalization language and IBQ-REG outcomes at 12 months. Ongoing data collection will expand the sample size and generate longitudinal data (participating 6-month-olds will be re-tested at 12 months). Further analysis will examine whether the frequency and density of parental mentalization language are associated with IBQ-REG scores at 12 months.

Authors

• Anne Nields, Boston Children’s Hospital
  Presenting Author

• Emily Yedam Yang, Harvard Medical School

• Ran Wei, Harvard Medical School

• Charles A. Nelson, Harvard Medical School