Mind Your Language: A Brief, Knowledge-Based Intervention to Promote Parental Mental-State Talk in Parent-Child Interactions

• In Event: Tell me, What’s on Your Mind? An Exploration of Mental-State Talk Discussions

Abstract

According to meta-analytical data, individual variation in performance on theory-of-mind (ToM) tasks is moderately associated with early environmental influences, such as parental mental-state talk (MST; Devine & Hughes, 2018). Social accounts of theory-of-mind development suggest exposure to MST plays a pivotal role in the emergence of ToM by providing opportunities to create and test expectations with continuous refinement (Nelson, 2005; Carpendale & Lewis, 2006). Despite clear longitudinal associations between parental MST and false-belief understanding, the nature of these associations, and of mental-state talk itself, remains unclear. In this paper, we describe the development of a training paradigm to investigate the malleability of parental MST over time, as well as exploring the stability of MST over contexts.

We developed a brief knowledge-based intervention to increase parents’ awareness of potential benefits of using MST with children in order to identify whether MST is something that can be manipulated (e.g. Leech, Wei, Harring & Rowe, 2018). Baseline measurements of MST provided us with insight into the rank-order stability of mental-state talk across contexts.

Fifty-four parent-child dyads (Mage at time 1 = 44 months, range = 36-55 months, SDage = 6.1 months; 28 boys, 70% white) took part in a 6-week study. All participants experienced three context observations and were randomly allocated to one of two training conditions, MST or spatial talk, a comparable intervention, which was matched to MST and designed as an active control. Parents were observed at home interacting with their child during three five-minute tasks: reading a book, playing with building blocks, and eating a snack (Figure 1). Verbatim transcripts of each of the three observations were coded for MST (Brown, Donelan‐McCall, and Dunn, 1996).

A mixed ANOVA with one between-groups factor (i.e., treatment vs. control) and one within-group factor (i.e., time 1 vs. time 2 vs. time 3) revealed a significant between-groups main effect of the intervention on the total amount of MST, F(1, 45) = 7.15, p = .010, η²p = .137, as well as a significant interaction between time and intervention condition, F(2, 90) = 22.31, p <.001, η²p = .331 (Figure 2). Parents in the MST condition used significantly more MST than those in the spatial talk condition, and significantly more MST than themselves at baseline. Partial correlations, controlling for age, gender, and overall verbosity, identified that there were no significant correlations between MST use across contexts at baseline, r(48)= .088, p = .541.

These findings suggest that parental MST is malleable and can be boosted using a brief knowledge-based intervention, and that these gains are sustained over 6 weeks. Results also suggest that MST varies as a function of context. Exploring the role of context in the distribution of MST is vital for furthering our understanding of MST as a concept, in and of itself. Evidence for malleability in parents’ talk paves the way for future interventions to promote mental-state talk, as a mechanism for testing developmental theories about the relation between theory-of-mind understanding and mental-state talk.

Authors

• Shannon Francis, University of Birmingham
  Presenting Author

• Ian Apperly, University of Birmingham
  Non-Presenting Author

• Rory T. Devine, University of Birmingham
  Non-Presenting Author