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- Title
Longitudinal Relations among Maternal Mind-Mindedness and Children's Understanding of Other People's Beliefs and Emotions.
- Authors
Shinohara, Ikuko
- Abstract
Maternal mind-mindedness (MM) is the tendency to treat an infant as an individual with a mind (Meins, 1997). Maternal MM was assessed by video based measurement when her children were 6 months old (N =38) . To assess mothers' use of internal state language with her children, mother-infant pairs were observed in free play interactions at 6 and 9 months of age. Children's understanding of other people's desires, beliefs, and emotions were tested at 36 months (N =29) and 48 months (N =31). Children's verbal ability was assessed at 48 months. Mothers' MM was significantly correlated with children's emotion understanding and verbal ability at 48 months. Path analysis showed that maternal MM positively predicted children's emotion understanding and verbal ability via mothers' rich comments on infants' internal states that observed at 6 months of age. On the other hand, mothers who had a moderate level of MM were more likely to have children who passed desire task at 36 months and false belief task at 48 months. These findings suggest that maternal MM in infancy predicted children's development of understanding of other person's mind. However, MM had different effects on children's comprehension of other's emotional and cognitive states.
- Subjects
CHILD psychology; PHILOSOPHY of emotions; CHILDREN'S language; MOTHER-child relationship; PARENT-child communication
- Publication
Japanese Journal of Developmental Psychology / Hattatsu Shinrigaku Kenkyū, 2011, Vol 22, Issue 3, p240
- ISSN
0915-9029
- Publication type
Article