Maternal Reflective Functioning and Reminiscing: The Moderating Role of Maltreatment

• In Event: Poster Session 01
  In Poster Session: PS 01 Topic - Parenting & Parent-Child Relationships

Abstract

Reminiscing (i.e., discussions of children’s past emotional experiences) is critical for children’s cognitive and socioemotional development (Nelson & Fivush, 2004). Maternal reminiscing varies in level of elaboration (i.e., statements and questions adding new details), yet little is known about processes underlying elaboration. One potential mechanism is maternal reflective functioning, or the tendency to consider children’s mental states and intentions (Slade, 2005). Reflective functioning includes interest and curiosity about children’s mental states and pre-mentalization, or the attribution of malevolent intentions to children’s behavior.

Reflective functioning may be especially relevant for elaboration in the context of maltreatment. Maltreating mothers have a tendency to demonstrate reduced elaboration during reminiscing (Valentino et al., 2019). Thus, it is possible that interest in children’s mental states is particularly beneficial for maltreating mothers’ elaboration. Furthermore, maltreating mothers’ difficulties with elaboration may be exacerbated when pre-mentalization is high. We hypothesized that interest and curiosity would be positively associated with elaboration for maltreating mothers, whereas nonmaltreating mothers would be highly elaborative regardless of interest. Similarly, we hypothesized that nonmaltreating mothers would be highly elaborative regardless of pre-mentalization, while pre-mentalization would be negatively associated with elaboration for maltreating mothers.

Participants included 151 maltreating and 77 nonmaltreating mothers and their 3- to 6-year-olds drawn from a longitudinal intervention. Maltreating dyads were recruited through the Department of Child Services and had substantiated maltreatment. Dyads reminisced about times the child felt happy, sad, scared, and angry. From transcriptions, coders used a frequency-based procedure common in the literature (e.g., Fivush & Sales, 2006) to code maternal subject-verb prepositions for elaborations, wh-questions, yes/no-questions, and confirmations. Indicators were square root transformed and summed to reflect total elaboration. Reliability was achieved (ICCs > .77). Mothers also completed the Parental Reflective Functioning Questionnaire (Luyten et al., 2017). Five items assessed interest (α = .71; “I am often curious to find out how my child feels”), and six items assessed pre-mentalization (α = .70; “My child cries around strangers to embarrass me”). Interactions were computed with mean centered interest and pre-mentalization.

Hierarchical linear regressions were performed in R predicting maternal elaboration with maternal language as a covariate (Table 1). As hypothesized, interest and maltreatment interacted to predict elaboration, F(1,223) = 4.13, p < .05. Simple slopes analyses (Figure 1) indicated that for nonmaltreating mothers, the association between interest and elaboration was nonsignificant, b = -0.47, p = 0.21; for maltreating mothers interest was positively associated with elaboration and was approaching significance, b = 0.53, p = 0.10. Johnson-Neyman probing revealed that when interest is outside the interval [.016, 39.58] the slope of maltreatment was significant; thus, maltreating and nonmaltreating mothers differed in their elaboration when interest was at the mean and 1 SD below it. The hypothesized interaction between pre-mentalization and maltreatment was nonsignificant. However, pre-mentalization was negatively associated with elaboration controlling for language and maltreatment. Pre-mentalization and maltreatment together explained a significant amount of variance in elaboration, F(2,224) = 5.17, p < .01. These findings highlight the role of maternal reflective functioning in reminiscing in an at-risk sample.

Authors

• Katherine Edler, University of Notre Dame
  Presenting Author

• Kristin Valentino, University of Notre Dame
  Non-Presenting Author