Rethinking maternal sensitivity: mothers' comments on infants' mental processes predict security of attachment at 12 months.

By E. Meins, Charles Fernyhough, Emma Fradley, Michelle R. Tuckey. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry and Allied Disciplines, 2001

810 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This study investigated predictors of attachment security in a play context using a sample of 71 mothers and their 6-month-old infants. We sought to rethink the concept of maternal sensitivity by focusing on mothers' ability accurately to read the mental states governing infant behaviour. Five categories were devised to assess this ability, four of which were dependent on maternal responses to infant behaviours, such as object-directed activity. The fifth, mothers' Appropriate minded-related comments, assessed individual differences in mothers' proclivity to comment appropriately on their infants' mental states and processes. Higher scores in this fifth category related to a secure attachment relationship at 12 months. Maternal sensitivity and Appropriate mind-related comments were independent predictors of attachment security at 12 months, respectively accounting for 6.5% and 12.7% of its variance. We suggest that these findings are in line with current theorising on internal working models of attachment, and may help to explain security-related differences in mentalising abilities.

Subfields: Clinical Psychology, Social Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/29b4f6d7919143d4c7f30b246470c115bd0ec8b3

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Citations in the corpus

Early Intervention and the Development of Self-Regulation (2002, background): “Elizabeth Meins and colleagues (Meins et al., 2001) provided a more direct test of this hypothesis.”
What are the Links Between Theory of Mind and Social Relations? Review, Reflections and New Directions for Studies of Typical and Atypical Development (2004, background): “…provided a more precise formulation of constructs such as maternal sensitivity (Meins, Fernyhough, Fradley & Tuckey, 2001) and an elaboration of mechanisms that may underpin the association between attachment security and theory-of-mind development (Fonagy & Target, 1997; Meins et al., 2001).”
Mind-mindedness in children: Individual differences in internal-state talk in middle childhood (2006, methodology): “Recall that Meins and colleagues found considerable variability in mothers’ ability accurately to ‘read’ their infants’ internal states (Meins et al., 2001), and in mothers’ tendency to describe their preschoolers with reference to their mental characteristics (Meins et al., 1998).”
Precursors of attachment security (2018, background): “hypothesis that mind-mindedness contributes to attachment security comes from work showing that mothers of secure infants are more likely than mothers of insecure infants to make appropriate mind-minded comments when interacting with their infants, an association now multiply replicated (Laranjo et ”
Mind-mindedness in adult and adolescent mothers: Relations to maternal sensitivity and infant attachment (2010, background): “This is speculative, however, as previous studies that examined mind-mindedness in relation to maternal sensitivity and child attachment (Laranjo et al., 2008; Lundy, 2003; Meins et al., 2001) report relations with appropriate comments only, thus not permitting comparison of the Table 3.”