Maris, Helen R.C; (2022) Investigating associations between maternal mental health, maternal Mind-Mindedness, and infant attachment security in a socioeconomically disadvantaged population. Doctoral thesis (D.Clin.Psy), UCL (University College London).

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Abstract

AIMS: Mentalizing, the ability to interpret the feelings, thoughts, wishes, and beliefs of ourselves and of others, is arguably one of the most uniquely human capacities, and central to our ability to function in society. Mentalizing is understood to develop in the context of early attachment relationships. Childhood maltreatment has many deleterious effects on emotional development and is associated with increased prevalence of mental health difficulties, though its relationship to mentalizing is as yet unknown. Adolescence is a significant period for social cognition and emotional development, and thus represents an important age to explore mentalizing capacities and its association with maltreatment. This review aims to systematically review the extant psychological literature in order to better understand the relationship between childhood maltreatment and adolescent mentalizing. METHOD: Studies were identified from a search of the PsycINFO, MEDLINE, Web of Science, Embase, Cochrane Library, Scopus, and ERIC online databases. Only peer-reviewed articles were included. Reviews, case studies, qualitative, and neuroimaging studies were excluded. Studies were rated for methodological quality using the Murray, Farrington, & Eisner (2009) checklist. RESULTS: 16 studies met the inclusion criteria for the review, exploring 3 different aspects of mentalizing (Reflective function; alexithymia; facial emotion recognition). This meta-analysis found an overall significant negative association between childhood maltreatment and adolescent mentalizing, with greater levels (or presence vs. absence) of maltreatment associated with poorer mentalizing capacity. Subgroup analyses, however, found that this association was only present in community samples, not clinical samples, and for only internal mentalizing (reflective functioning; alexithymia), not for external mentalizing (facial emotion recognition). Neither gender nor age were found to significantly moderated the relationship between childhood maltreatment and adolescent mentalizing. CONCLUSIONS: This study found a significant negative association between childhood maltreatment and adolescent mentalizing, which was moderated by mentalizing measure and sample type, but not by age and gender. Further research is needed to examine this relationship using larger samples, relying upon a wider range of more ecologically valid mentalizing tasks, exploring the impacts of different types of maltreatment and assessing their association with mentalizing using longitudinal research designs. Given the impacts that mentalizing deficits can have, this is an area of research that deserves further attention.

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