Mentalization, emotional dysregulation and attachment to alternative attachment figures in retrospectively defined earned secure adults

BACKGROUND

Researchers have tried to identify mechanisms through which an individual overcomes negative life experiences, proposing earning security as one of them. Retrospectively defined earned secures are recognized as individuals exhibiting secure attachments to their parents while evaluating the quality of their childhood care as low. This study aimed to examine attachment, mentalization, and emotional dysregulation in this group. We hypothesized that earned secures will report better mentalizing, lower emotion dysregulation, and more secure attachment to figures other than parents than insecure individuals.

PARTICIPANTS AND PROCEDURE

female adult sample (N = 272) completed the Experiences in Close Relationships-Relationship Structures questionnaire, Parental Bonding Instrument, Difficulties in Emotion Regulation Scale, and Mental State Task. The time devoted to psychotherapy and demographics were also controlled as contextual variables.

RESULTS

We identified an 'earned secure' group (14% of the sample), exhibiting secure attachment to mothers in adulthood despite reported inadequate care during childhood, along with the continuously secure, insecure, and 'lost secure' groups. People from the earned secure and secure groups reported better emotional regulation and some aspects of mentalization than those in the insecure and lost secure groups. They equally frequently reported the presence of an adult other than parents who were important to them in childhood, but the attachment to them was more secure. We did not find evidence of differences between the groups in the duration of psychotherapy.

CONCLUSIONS

Secure attachment to alternative attachment figures, along with some mentalization and emotional regulation aspects, may be considered significant factors for earning security.

Cognitive reappraisal training for parents of children with autism spectrum disorder

Parents of children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) experience higher stress levels than those of typically developing children. The goal of the current study was to examine whether a mentalization-based intervention would enhance parental cognitive reappraisal, an adaptive form of emotion regulation associated with lower levels of stress. Findings from 27 parents who completed a short training indicated an improvement in cognitive reappraisal. In exploratory analyses, two different types of reappraisal were examined. The intervention-related improvement was found mainly with one type of reappraisal, namely reflective reappraisal that consist of cognitive reappraisal with mentalization characteristics. In light of the evidence indicating that high cognitive reappraisal and high reflective functioning are associated with quality caregiving, findings from the current study suggesting that a brief mentalization-based intervention supports ASD parents' cognitive reappraisal with mentalization characteristics are promising and warrant further investigation.

Loss-related mental states impair executive functions in a context of sadness

Stress and anxiety have been shown to temporally impair executive functions, but the role of other emotions, such as sadness, has been inconclusive. Moreover, the role of affect regulation in this relationship has not been extensively studied. The present research investigated whether certain types of mental states (mental output resulting from the use of affect regulation within a specific context or with respect to a specific material or theme) relative to the context of loss would predict impairment of executive functions. Participants were randomly assigned to read either a loss-related newspaper article inducing sadness or a neutral newspaper article. Results showed that low mental states relative to loss (maladaptive affect regulation) predicted impairment of executive functions following an induction of sadness, but not following the neutral induction. Conversely, high mental states (adaptive affect regulation) were not predictive of impairment of executive functions in both the sadness and neutral condition. These findings have implications for the boundaries within which emotion can disrupt high-order cognitive processes.

The Mental States Task (MST): Correlates and New Perspectives on Mentalizing in a Lebanese Student Sample

Mentalizing is defined as one's capacity to think in terms of mental states underlying one's own and others' behaviors. It has been posited to develop within the context of a secure attachment relationship and has been linked to a myriad of psychological adjustment variables. Given the scarcity of research on mentalizing in Lebanon, this study aimed to investigate mentalizing in a sample of 293 Lebanese undergraduate students using a novel tool, the Mental State Task (MST). Higher mentalizing scores were found to be positively correlated with self-esteem, neurotic defenses, authenticity and adaptive emotion regulation strategies, as well as negatively correlated with psychological symptomatology. This study also provided descriptions of the six mental states measured by the MST continuum based on their correlations with related constructs. Findings diverge with the literature in relation to the association between defense styles and MST scores, which were posited to reflect cultural specificities of this sample.

Remembering and Communicating Climate Change Narratives - The Influence of World Views on Selective Recollection

We examine how people remember stories about climate change and how they communicate these stories to others. Drawing on theories of reconstructive memory and cultural theory, we assume that recollection is systematically affected by an individual's world view as well as by the world view of the target audience. In an experimental study with a Norwegian representative sample (N = 266), participants read a story about three politicians, in which each protagonist was described as holding a specific world view and as trying to tackle climate change with a corresponding strategy (individualistic/free market oriented, hierarchical/technology-oriented, or egalitarian/sustainability-oriented). After 1 day and then after 1 week, participants were asked to retell the story as if to somebody who was characterized as being either an individualist, a hierarchist, or an egalitarian; in addition, a neutral recall control condition without a specified audience was included. Participants' own world view was assessed and they were classified as endorsing individualism, or hierarchism, or egalitarianism. We hypothesized that retellings would be selectively reconstructed according to the world view of the participant, as well as tuned to the audience's world view. We assessed the cognitive structure of the recollected story, and, using methods from computational text analysis, we computed similarities among retellings and the original narrative, and among retellings and world views. Results suggest that (i) retellings become less accurate over time, (ii) retelling to an audience with an explicit world view leads to more strongly filtered retellings than recalling without a specified audience, but the filter operates in a non-specific manner with respect to world views, (iii) the cognitive structure of the recollected story shows small but systematic differences concerning the link between story problem and solution as a function of the participant's and the audience's world view. No interaction was found between the world view of the participant and that of the audience. Results emphasize the role of world views in communicating climate change, and might help to better understand phenomena such as polarization and echo chamber effects.

Fluctuations of mentalization in the context of relational stimuli and representational contents

Background

Mentalization as the ability to interpret human behavior in terms of mental states is not a stable characteristic but is subject to fluctuation depending on the context. Nonlinear system theories explain the fluctuation of mentalization by stressing the context of the relationship in which there emerges a new quality of mentalization and/or activation of elements of the internal system of representations.

Participants and procedure

The aim of the study was to test whether the fluctuation of mentalization depends on the type of relational stimulus (imagining the responsiveness/unresponsiveness of a significant other) or on the interaction of the stimulus with the content aspects of representation (a predominance of relatedness/sociotropy or a predominance of self-definition/autonomy). The investigators collected the utterances of 49 students about a situation involving a significant other, which was preceded by a request to imagine that this person was responsive (Condition 1) or unresponsive (Condition 2). The level of mentalization was assessed by means of the Metacognition Assessment Scale. The investigators divided the group into two subgroups with different configu­rations of representational contents (a predominance of relatedness/sociotropy or self-definition/autonomy) bas­ed on the scores in the Personal Style Inventory.

Results

Mentalization fluctuations dependent on the interaction of the stimulus and representational contents were observed in the group with a predominance of sociotropic contents for interpersonal mentalization but not for self-reflective mentalizing.

Conclusions

Mentalization must not be decontextualized; however, it is not the stimulus alone but the interaction of the stimulus with representational content that determines the fluctuations of mentalization. Individuals with a predominance of relatedness experience a decline in the capacity for interpersonal mentalization after imagining a significant other’s unresponsiveness, which can be interpreted as resulting from a weakening of the function of differentiating.

Networks of self-defining memories as a contributing factor to emotional openness

Emotional openness is characterised by a capacity to tolerate threatening self-relevant material and an interest towards new emotional situations. We investigated how specific networks of memories could be an important contributing factor to emotional openness. At Phase 1, participants completed measures of personality traits and emotional intelligence, described a self-defining memory, provided other memories associated with it, and rated the valence of each of their memories. A score assessing the complexity of this memory network, comprising the number of memories reported and their valence diversity, was created. Two weeks later, in laboratory, participants watched an anxiety-inducing film and took part in an interview assessing their emotional openness to the film. They completed a cognitive task before and after the film to measure ego depletion. Controlling for traits and emotional intelligence, memory network complexity was positively associated with emotional openness and negatively with ego depletion. The mental organisation of self-defining memories thus appears to be a critical factor contributing to emotional openness.

Emotion Dysregulation, Mentalization and Romantic Attachment in the Nonclinical Adolescent Female Sample

The main goal of the current study is to verify the relationships between emotion dysregulation, mentalization, and romantic attachment in late adolescent girls (N = 120). Adolescence is a very dynamic and sensitive period, in which many changes occur in attachment and emotion regulation. The role of the primary attachment figures is gradually taken over by peers, and the beginnings of the development of romantic attachment are seen. In summary, this study was able to determine that the level of dysregulation of emotions in girls during late adolescence can be partially explained by mentalization and levels of anxiety (though not of avoidance) regarding a romantic partner, though attachment anxiety is more important for explaining emotion dysregulation than the level of mentalization. Only two aspects of emotion dysregulation show relationships with mentalization: nonacceptance of emotional responses and lack of emotional clarity. Adolescence is considered to be a critical period for interventions to protect against the onset of psychopathology. Confirmation of these relationships appears to be important for the design of therapeutic interventions. Our findings may suggest that attachment patterns, mentalization and emotion dysregulation may be good targets for therapeutic intervention in adolescence.

The Incremental Validity of Narrative Identity in Predicting Well-Being

Grounded in four theoretical positions—structural, cognitive, phenomenological, and ethical—the present review demonstrates the empirical evidence for the incremental validity of narrative identity as a cross-sectional indicator and prospective predictor of well-being, compared with other individual difference and situational variables. In doing so, we develop an organizational framework of four categories of narrative variables: (a) motivational themes, (b) affective themes, (c) themes of integrative meaning, and (d) structural elements. Using this framework, we detail empirical evidence supporting the incremental association between narrative identity and well-being, a case that is strongest for motivational, affective, and integrative meaning themes. These categories of themes serve as vital complimentary correlates and predictors of well-being, alongside commonly assessed variables such as dispositional personality traits. We then use the theoretically grounded review of the empirical literature to develop concrete areas of future research for the field.

Promoting Mentalization in Clinical Psychology at Universities: A Linguistic Analysis of Student Accounts

This study investigated the structure of mentalization (Bateman & Fonagy, 2012) in a training context. The dual purpose was to evaluate the effectiveness of practicum student training and whether the Linguistic Inquiry method (Pennebaker, 2000) could be used to evaluate the three dimensions of mentalization — relational, cognitive, and emotional. The training utilized the groups and their accounts as devices and mediators to conceptualize the relationship between self-mentalizing training, the academic context and the practicum experience. Accounts from 38 Italian students pursuing master degree in Clinical, Dynamic, and Community Psychology were analyzed by LIWC software. The Wilcoxon test showed a significant increase in mentalizing words during the middle and end of the term, as compared with the beginning. The results displayed a need to promote mentalization within academic settings and indicated the value of this competence for clinical psychology.