Children's Mental State Research Articles

Mentalizing Makes Parenting Work: A Review about Parental Reflective Functioning and Clinical Interventions to Improve It.

In the last decade several studies have investigated the role of parental reflective functioning (RF), defined as the parental ability to understand his/her child’s mental states, on the child’s development. Herein, a narrative review on parental RF is presented aimed at (1) presenting an overview of the existing empirical studies, (2) pinpointing unrequited questions, and (3) identifying future research directions. Specifically, the current review focused on (a) the impact of parental RF on the quality of caregiving and the child’s attachment security, (b) the effect of parental RF on the child’s emotion regulation and the child’s RF, (c) maternal RF in women with a history of neglect and abuse, (d) the efficacy of mentalization-based clinical interventions, and (e) the recently developed Parental Reflective Questionnaire. The following terms “maternal RF,” “paternal RF,” “parental RF,” “parental mentalization,” “maternal mentalization,” and “paternal mentalization” were searched in titles, abstracts, and main texts using Medline, Web of Science, and Scopus databases. Next, a search in Mendeley was also conducted. Inclusion criteria comprised original articles if they refer to the RF Scale (Fonagy et al., 1998) and were published in an English language, peer-reviewed journal before July, 2016. According to exclusion criteria, dissertations, qualitative or theoretical papers, and chapters in books were not taken into account. The review includes 47 studies that, taken together, supported the notion that higher parental RF was associated with adequate caregiving and the child’s attachment security, whereas low maternal RF was found in mothers whose children suffered from anxiety disorders, impairment in emotion regulation, and externalizing behaviors. In addition, higher parental RF was associated with better mentalizing abilities in children. However, unexpected findings have emerged from the most recent randomized controlled trials that tested the efficacy of mentalization-based interventions in high risk samples of mothers, raising questions about the suitability of the verbal measures in capturing the mentalizing processes at the root of the parental capacity to be adequately responsive to the child’s emotional needs.

Peer Interaction Does Not Always Improve Children's Mental State Talk Production in Oral Narratives. A Study in 6- to 10-Year-Old Italian Children.

Joint narratives are a mean through which children develop and practice their Theory of Mind (ToM), thus they represent an ideal means to explore children’s use and development of mental state talk. However, creating a learning environment for storytelling based on peer interaction, does not necessarily mean that students will automatically exploit it by engaging in productive collaboration, thus it is important to explore under what conditions peer interaction promotes children’s ToM. This study extends our understanding of social aspects of ToM, focusing on the effect of joint narratives on school-age children’s mental state talk. Fifty-six Italian primary school children participated in the study (19 females and 37 males). Children created a story in two different experimental conditions (individually and with a partner randomly assigned). Each story told by the children, as well as their dialogs were recorded and transcribed. Transcriptions of narratives were coded in terms of text quality and mental state talk, whereas transcriptions of dialogs were coded in terms of quality of interaction. The results from this study confirmed that peer interaction does not always improve children’s mental state talk performances in oral narratives, but certain conditions need to be satisfied. Peer interaction was more effective on mental state talk with lower individual levels and productive interactions, particularly in terms of capacity to regulate the interactions. When children were able to focus on the interaction, as well as the product, they were also exposed to each other’s reasoning behind their viewpoint. This level of intersubjectivity, in turn, allowed them to take more in consideration the contribution of mental states to the narrative.

Strategies to Design Dental Clinic for Children with Mental Health Promotion Approach in the Treatment Process

Dental Clinic is one of the places that severely affect children's mental states. Poor design of such environments, regardless of the needs of children, has aggravated fear and anxiety in them and ignoring this issue will have negative effects. The fundamental problem that exists today is ignoring and neglecting children. Because children are at an age that are not able to participate in the public sphere independently, so they are ignored. Parents, irrespective of them, take their children to clinics for treatment which are not designed for them. Fear of dental clinic causes behavioral problems such as aggressiveness in children and a lack of proper control will endanger children's health. The purpose of this research is to design and evaluate environmental factors effective in reducing fear and anxiety in children and providing strategies to promote their mental health. To achieve these objectives, data are collected through field and desk as well as documentation method and some specific solutions are provided for designing children's dental clinic which creates a pleasant environment with flexible spaces adapted to their age group in the treatment process. The results of this study suggest that attractiveness of natural environment, environmental graphics, play spaces, color and light can have a direct impact on improving the treatment process. DOI: 10.5901/mjss.2016.v7n4S1p46

Counselling psychology research in Greece

Research activity in the field of counselling psychology has been growing relatively fast in Greece, raising new scientific challenges and generating new knowledge relevant to the Greek population and culture. In an effort to disseminate the current advances in this special field and to stimulate discussion on the future research directions, this special issue of The European Journal of Counselling Psychology is dedicated to recent developments in counselling and counselling psychology research in Greece.The scientific fields of Counselling and Counselling Psychology are fairly new in Greece and it is primarily due to the recently established post-graduate programmes that these psychology specialties have become better known in our country. Thanks to these and other European post-graduate counsellor education programs, mainly in Anglo-Saxon countries, Greek students now have the opportunity to systematically study and practice counselling in various settings, drawing from diverse orientations, theories and models. As a result, many young scientists have poured into the field with some of them occupying relevant academic positions in the main Greek universities. They constitute a very active, albeit small, research community, conducting counselling, teaching and investigating various issues related to the specific characteristics of the Greek culture and population.To give a flavor of this activity, six articles have been invited, which we believe provide a representative sample of the research currently being carried out in our country. The articles have been presented at the 5th PanHellenic Counselling Psychology Conference, which took place at the University of Patras in November 2014. All articles address issues that are considered important regarding therapeutic applications of counselling Greek people. In addition, all studies have been conducted by eminent Greek scholars and their collaborators, using rigorous methodological approaches, which varied from qualitative to quantitative methods and from case studies to longitudinal research designs. By reading these papers, one gets a feeling for the variability of the topics that Greek counsellors and counselling psychologists deal with, as well as their propositions of where future research should mostly focus.The first three papers examine issues related to children's special physical psychological or mental states. The last two papers focus more on family related issues. The fourth paper is the only one touching upon the effects of the economic crisis on people's well-being. This longitudinal study tries to investigate the role of the economic crisis, which started in Greece around 2010, on several psychological problems such as depression, anxiety and stress.The special issue begins with a paper co-authored by Angeliki Gena, Petros Galanis, Erifylli Tsirempolou, Eleni Michalopoulou, and Kalliopi Sarafidou regarding Parent-Training for Families with a Child with ASD: A Naturalistic Systemic Behavior Analytic Model. The paper aims at presenting the importance of early intervention in the case of children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), based on an intensive parent-training programme. Although the study described in the paper was based on only two cases of toddlers, it managed to highlight the procedures through which such a program can prove its effectiveness.The second paper entitled Parents' and School Career Counsellors' Evaluations of the Occupational Competence of Children with Dyslexia is by Kleopatra Diakogiorgi and Ermioni Tsiligirian. It studies the cognitions of parents of dyslexic children and school career counsellors about dyslexic children's career choices by examining their evaluations of occupational competence (EOCs). …

Mental state talk in children's face-to-face and telephone narratives

This study analyzes children's theory of mind through mental state talk in two conditions differing for the physical presence/absence of an interlocutor and a shared context. The participants in this study were 115 five- to seven-year-old Italian children. We elicited children's mental state talk through a narrative task. Each child participated under two conditions, face-to-face and telephone story-telling. We coded transcripts to isolate terms referring to mental states. The two total scores, one for mental state talk in the face-to-face conditions and another for the over the phone conditions, correlated. Students used more mental state terms in the telephone conditions than they did in the face-to-face conditions. Children showed more willingness and used more cognitive and moral terms in the telephone conditions than they did in the face-face conditions, with age playing a moderating role. This study confirms the recontextualizing effect of the telephone in eliciting children's mental state talk.

Musing on Being and Reflecting on All That Can Be Found: Introduction to Tuber’s, Conway’s and Sossin’s Papers

This article is an introduction to the papers by Tuber, Conway and Sossin that follow. A shared element in the three papers is the therapist's capacity to hold a child's mental and emotional state in mind and to reflect on his experiences in life. In providing an account of psychodynamic work with children with an LD (Tuber) and Autism Spectrum (Sossin) diagnosis, and in reviewing current research on psychodynamic treatments for children with ADHD (Conway), the three authors add to the growing number of articles on psychoanalytic and psychodynamic work with children with an underlying neurological disorder that have begun to appear in the literature. Collectively, these papers suggest that children and adolescents with developmental disabilities can benefit from treatments that are mindful of their internal world and seek to expand their understanding of themselves and others.

Investigating the association between parental reflective functioning and distress tolerance in motherhood

Parental reflective functioning, referring to the capacity of a parent to consider their child's mental states as they relate to their behavior, may support sensitive and adaptive parenting. We investigated the relationship between parental reflective functioning and tolerance of distress in a sample of recent mothers (N=59). Participants completed self-report measures of parental reflective functioning and distress tolerance, as well as two behavioral distress tolerance tasks. We also examined blood pressure and heart rate during the laboratory session. Mothers reporting more difficulty in recognizing and understanding their child's mental states displayed decreased tolerance of distress on our behavioral and self-report measures. Further, we found evidence of a relationship between these measures and assessments of peripheral physiology. These findings are discussed in the context of reflective functioning and distress tolerance in parenthood, and their implications for parenting interventions.

The Relation Between Executive Function and Theory of Mind is More Than Skin Deep

A simple “expression” account of the relation between executive function (EF) and children's developing theory of mind (ToM) has difficulty accounting for the generality of the changes occurring in children's mental-state understanding during the preschool years. The current study of preschool children (N = 43) showed that EF—especially conflict EF—related uniformly to ToM measures that imposed either high or low executive demands, independent of verbal ability. These findings can be explained within an emergence account wherein executive skills are implicated in the acquisition of mental-state concepts as opposed to merely the expression of these concepts in task performance.

The Weird World of Cross-Cultural False-Belief Research: A True- and False-Belief Study Among Samoan Children Based on Commands

Previous cross-cultural research using false-belief tasks has explored whether children's theory of mind develops synchronously across cultures. Success on false-belief tasks is usually interpreted as an important indicator of children's mental state understanding, but inconsistent findings have led to questions regarding the interpretation of children's success and failure. Based on the assumptions of perceptual access reasoning (Hedger & Fabricius, 2011) and reflecting on inconsistencies in cross-cultural false-belief research, we argue for the advantages of the additional use of true-belief tasks, which can help to differentiate between different levels of children's reasoning. Consequently, a false-belief task and a true-belief task were derived from typical Samoan adult–child interactions. The performance of 40 Samoan children aged 5 to 7 years old was compared to the performance of 40 age-matched German children. While German children passed both tasks, Samoan children failed the false-belief task and did not reply above chance level in the true-belief task. According to our knowledge, this is the first study using both a false-belief task and true-belief task in a cross-cultural setting. Our results reveal additional patterns of reasoning that are neither in line with perceptual access reasoning nor with a representational understanding of false beliefs. The study is discussed in terms of a more general problem of experimental research in non-Western settings.

The Development of Social Cognition: Preschoolers' Use of Mental State Talk in Peer Conflicts

Research Findings: This research examines preschoolers' use of mental state terms in naturally occurring peer conflicts in the classroom to determine how children use mental state terms for organizing their social interactions. Analyses focus on the types, frequencies, and social interactive functions of mental state terms. Utterances (N = 166) with mental state terms from 124 conflict episodes were analyzed. Children used a number of different mental state terms, want and need being the most frequently used, to index their own and their interlocutors' desires for subtle interactive purposes. Want was paired most often with bids for action, objects, inclusion in a play area, or clarification of another child's mental state. Need was most often used when directing the other child's action or attention, to justify, clarify, or insist on their own action or previous request. Practice or Policy: Findings suggest that children's peer conflicts constitute a rich setting for the active construction of social relationships through the use of utterances with mental state language. This emphasis on peer interactions has the potential to inform new ways of supporting children's self–other development as a foundation for academic success.

When will Little Red Riding Hood become scared? Children’s attribution of mental states to a story character.

As children listen to a simple action-based narrative, they construct a dynamic representation of the protagonist's movements, visual perspective, and goal-directed thoughts. We examined children's representations of more complex narratives in which the protagonist will encounter an unexpected outcome upon reaching his or her goal. Three studies involving 105 children between 3 and 6 years of age showed that children shifted in the mental states they attributed depending on the distance of the protagonist from the unexpected outcome. Even though children consistently recognized that the protagonist did not know about the surprise at any point, they increasingly attributed feelings and thoughts consistent with the surprise. The studies highlight the degree to which children's mental state attributions are dynamic rather than fixed by their current theory of mind.

Mothers' Cognitive References to 2‐Year‐Olds Predict Theory of Mind at Ages 6 and 10

Mothers' mental-state references predict individual differences in preschoolers' false-belief (FB) understanding; less is known about the origins of corresponding variation in school-age children. To address this gap, 105 children completed observations with their mothers at child ages 2 and 6, three FB tasks and a verbal comprehension test at age 3, and five FB tasks at age 6. Seventy-seven of these children completed five Strange Stories at age 10. Individual differences in mothers' cognitive references at child age 2 predicted variation in children's FB understanding at age 6 and Strange Stories scores at age 10 (controlling for number of mothers' turns and children's mental-state references, verbal comprehension and FB understanding at age 3, and mothers' cognitive references at child age 6).

CHILD MENTAL HEALTH AND EDUCATIONAL ATTAINMENT: MULTIPLE OBSERVERS AND THE MEASUREMENT ERROR PROBLEM

SUMMARY We examine the effect of survey measurement error on the empirical relationship between child mental health and personal and family characteristics, and between child mental health and educational progress. Our contribution is to use unique UK survey data that contain (potentially biased) assessments of each child's mental state from three observers (parent, teacher and child), together with expert (quasi-)diagnoses, using an assumption of optimal diagnostic behaviour to adjust for reporting bias. We use three alternative restrictions to identify the effect of mental disorders on educational progress. Maternal education and mental health, family income and major adverse life events are all significant in explaining child mental health, and child mental health is found to have a large influence on educational progress. Our preferred estimate is that a one-standard-deviation reduction in ‘true’ latent child mental health leads to a 2- to 5-month loss in educational progress. We also find a strong tendency for observers to understate the problems of older children and adolescents compared to expert diagnosis. © 2015 The Authors. Journal of Applied Econometrics published by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Povezanost dječjega govora o mentalnim stanjima s nekim obilježjima obitelji te roditeljskim govorom o mentalnim stanjima

Cilj istraživanja bio je utvrditi postoje li znacajne povezanosti između razlicitih vrsta govora o mentalnim stanjima kod djece od 17 do 37 mjeseci te nekih obilježja obitelji (imovinskoga stanja, mogucnosti zadovoljavanja potreba domacinstva, obrazovanja oca i majke, broja djece) te razlicitih vrsta govora o mentalnim stanjima roditelja. Prikupljeni su uzorci djecjega i roditeljskoga govora na temelju kojih je provedena analiza govora o mentalnom stanju želje, kao i misljenja i vjerovanja te govora o emocijama. Ostali podatci prikupljeni su upitnikom. Rezultati pokazuju kako roditelji djece koja vise govore o željama kao mentalnim stanjima vise govore i o mentalnom stanju želje, ali i misljenja i vjerovanja, no ne i o emocijama. Nadalje, roditelji djece koja su imala zabilježen barem jedan iskaz o željama kao mentalnim stanjima u vecoj se mjeri referiraju na želje te misljenje i vjerovanje nego roditelji djece kod koje nije zabilježen govor o željama. Nisu pronađene znacajne povezanosti kolicine djecjega govora o željama kao mentalnim stanjima i obiteljskih obilježja. Rezultati upucuju na važnost izucavanja obilježja roditelja u kontekstu izucavanja djecjega govora o mentalnim stanjima, odnosno razvoja sposobnosti teorije uma.

Parental reflective functioning is associated with tolerance of infant distress but not general distress: Evidence for a specific relationship using a simulated baby paradigm

Parental reflective functioning represents the capacity of a parent to think about their own and their child's mental states and how these mental states may influence behavior. Here we examined whether this capacity as measured by the Parental Reflective Functioning Questionnaire relates to tolerance of infant distress by asking mothers (N=21) to soothe a life-like baby simulator (BSIM) that was inconsolable, crying for a fixed time period unless the mother chose to stop the interaction. Increasing maternal interest and curiosity in their child's mental states, a key feature of parental reflective functioning, was associated with longer persistence times with the BSIM. Importantly, on a non-parent distress tolerance task, parental reflective functioning was not related to persistence times. These findings suggest that parental reflective functioning may be related to tolerance of infant distress, but not distress tolerance more generally, and thus may reflect specificity to persistence behaviors in parenting contexts.

Parent-infant relationships: Supporting parents to adopt a reflective stance

This article draws on current research, highlighting the importance of parents being able to ‘mentalise’—to make sense of their own and their child's mental state. Parents who ‘hold their child in mind’ are likely to be able to interpret behaviour in terms of his or her underlying feeling states. It is argued that health visitors and early years workers are ideally placed to explicitly ‘scaffold’ parents to adopt a reflective stance when trying to make sense of their infant's behaviour. A range of interventions is discussed, beginning in the prenatal period. In conclusion, the opportunities for practitioners to reflect on and be affirmed in their own practice are highlighted.

The Relation between Mind‐mindedness in Mothers with Borderline Personality Disorder and Mental State Understanding in their Children

This study investigated relations between mind‐mindedness in mothers with borderline personality disorder (BPD) and mental state understanding in their children. Participants were 20 mothers with BPD and 19 mothers without personality disorder and their children, aged 39–61 months. Children's mental state understanding was examined via a battery of theory of mind and emotion labelling tasks. Maternal mind‐mindedness was assessed by mothers' use of mental state references to describe their children relative to other attributes. Maternal BPD was associated with fewer references to children's mental states as well as poorer levels of mental state understanding in their children. Findings lend some empirical support to recent theoretical suggestions that BPD is associated with a reduced capacity for mentalization, as well as reduced capacity for mental state understanding in children of mothers with BPD. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Tracking children's mental states while solving algebra equations

Behavioral and function magnetic resonance imagery (fMRI) data were combined to infer the mental states of students as they interacted with an intelligent tutoring system. Sixteen children interacted with a computer tutor for solving linear equations over a six-day period (days 0-5), with days 1 and 5 occurring in an fMRI scanner. Hidden Markov model algorithms combined a model of student behavior with multi-voxel imaging pattern data to predict the mental states of students. We separately assessed the algorithms' ability to predict which step in a problem-solving sequence was performed and whether the step was performed correctly. For day 1, the data patterns of other students were used to predict the mental states of a target student. These predictions were improved on day 5 by adding information about the target student's behavioral and imaging data from day 1. Successful tracking of mental states depended on using the combination of a behavioral model and multi-voxel pattern analysis, illustrating the effectiveness of an integrated approach to tracking the cognition of individuals in real time as they perform complex tasks.

Innovative Project Makes MH Care More Accessible in Primary Care

Innovative Project Makes MH Care More Accessible in Primary Care

Child Mental Health and Educational Attainment: Multiple Observers and the Measurement Error Problem

We examine the effect of survey measurement error on the empirical relationship between child mental health and personal and family characteristics, and between child mental health and educational progress. Our contribution is to use unique UK survey data that contains (potentially biased) assessments of each child's mental state from three observers (parent, teacher and child), together with expert (quasi-) diagnoses, using an assumption of optimal diagnostic behaviour to adjust for reporting bias. We use three alternative restrictions to identify the effect of mental disorders on educational progress. Maternal education and mental health, family income, and major adverse life events, are all significant in explaining child mental health, and child mental health is found to have a large influence on educational progress. Our preferred estimate is that a 1-standard deviation reduction in 'true' latent child mental health leads to a 2-5 months loss in educational progress. We also find a strong tendency for observers to understate the problems of older children and adolescents compared to expert diagnosis.