Mind-Mindedness and Theory of Mind: Mediating Roles of Language and Perspectival Symbolic Play

Mind-mindedness and theory of mind: mediating roles of language and perspectival symbolic play.

Relations among indices of maternal mind-mindedness (appropriate and nonattuned mind-related comments) and children's: (a) internal state vocabulary and perspectival symbolic play at 26 months (N = 206), and (b) theory of mind (ToM) at 51 months (n = 161) were investigated. Appropriate comments were positively associated with ToM, but were unrelated to internal state language and perspectival s...

Maternal mind-mindedness and feeding

Maternal mind-mindedness, or the tendency to view the child as a mental agent, has been shown to predict sensitive and responsive parenting behavior. As yet the role of mind-mindedness has not been explored in the context of feeding interactions. This study evaluates the relations between maternal mind-mindedness at 6 months of infant age and subsequently observed maternal sensitivity and feedi...

Maternal mind-mindedness and attachment security as predictors of theory of mind understanding.

This study investigated relations between social interaction during infancy and children's subsequent theory of mind (ToM). Infant-mother pairs (N = 57) were observed in a free-play context at 6 months. Interactions were coded for (a) mothers' use of mental state language that commented appropriately on the infants' mental states, and (b) mothers' use of mental state language that did not appro...

Running Head: MENTALIZING AND MIND-MINDEDNESS

The Symbolic Mind: Apes, symbols, and the evolution of language

The debate whether most profitably to study nonhuman apes, henceforth "apes", in the field or in captivity rests on questionable conceptions about the history of the two research traditions and on questionable notions such as the idea of a species' natural environment. Exposing these assumptions lets us more readily examine the current evidence we have for early rearing influence on ape cogniti...