Do mind-mindedness measures examine an overarching construct?

An aim of the current study was to establish the relationship between levels of mind- mindedness found in the two measures and to examine concurrent correlations and possible directions of influence. If both operationalisations of maternal mind-

mindedness are examining the same overarching construct, the representational and interactional measures should be related.

Although both stemming from maternal representations, there are fundamental differences between the two operationalisations. Crucially, both measures involve the mother thinking of her child as a mental agent, but only the interactional measure can assess whether the mother then goes on to treat her child as someone with internal states. Only the interactional measure is able to provide observational evidence regarding mothers’ behaviour. This measure originates from

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the supposition that representations are grounded in interactions which means that mothers’ representations should then be translated into behaviour.

In contrast to the interactional measure, the representational measure is retrospective and reflective. A criticism of the reflective quality inherent in the measure is that this method of measurement may be more likely to induce “canned responses” from mothers about their children rather than being a true reflection of how the mother represents her child. Another important difference between the measures is that the interactional measure allows an assessment of accuracy of representations, by focusing on the attunement of the mother’s language in interactions, but investigating accuracy of representations is not possible in the representational measure.

There is scant research evidence confirming that the two measures are related; studies tending to use only one of the measures. However, three studies have used a representational and an interactional measure (Arnott & Meins, 2008; Lundy, 2013; Meins et al., 2003). Both measures of mind-mindedness were used in a longitudinal study by Meins et al. (2003). Here, mothers’ early interactional mind- mindedness was found to positively relate to later representational mind-

mindedness. However, the measures were used over two time points which could be viewed as a limitation in establishing their convergent validity because it is not possible to say whether mothers’ mind-mindedness changed over time and that this change accounted for the relationship between the measures. In a study by Arnott and Meins (2008), the total number of comments rather than mental attributes produced by mothers in their antenatal descriptions of what their unborn child might be like in the future, were found to positively relate to appropriate mind-related comments in interactions. As the standard index of representational mind- mindedness, that of mental attributes, was not related to interactional mind- mindedness, the measures were not shown to be unequivocally related.

Lundy (2013), in the only study to use both measures concurrently, investigated whether interactional attunement played a mediating role in parents’ mind- mindedness and preschoolers’ theory of mind. In doing so, they used a

representational measure of mind-mindedness and a 5-minute, laboratory-based parent-child interaction on a puzzle construction task with 4-year-olds. Interactional attunement in this task was used as an index of online mind-mindedness and was viewed by the author as a proxy for the standard interactional measure. It was

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predicted that parents who produced a higher proportion of mental descriptions on the representational measure would demonstrate greater attunement to their child’s mental processes in the online measure. The task was assessed first of all for effectiveness of parental scaffolding with parental interventions being coded in terms of level of specificity of instruction and the child’s success following an intervention. Secondly, sensitivity to feedback in the interaction was then scored, using criteria set by Meins (1997), which investigated a parent’s ability to modify their assistance based on their child’s performance. The assumption was that parents who were able to use their children’s performance on the task to gauge their thought processes would be better at intervening at an appropriate level. The

number of times a parent appropriately modified their level of instruction was scored as a proportion of the total number of interventions. This was taken to be the index of online mind-mindedness.

Mothers’ mind-mindedness on the representational measure was found to positively correlate with the online measure (U = .41). Higher levels of mind-mindedness in the representational measure also predicted higher interactional attunement in the online measure. However, there are limitations in this study’s ability to provide evidence that representational and interactional mind-mindedness are related. The online measure used in the study was a measure of an appropriate level of

intervention rather than a measure of appropriate mind-related comments in interactions. It could then be said that this is not measuring mind-mindedness but indexing a different type of interactional attunement to that specified by Meins and Fernyhough (2010). It also took place within the confines of a structured task and involved parental scaffolding rather than taking place in the context of free play and involving general mother-child conversation. Based on the findings of these three studies, it is not possible to state unequivocally that the two measures are

convergent.