Does Manipulating Parental Mentalisation in Dolls affect Children’s Epistemic Trust and Attachment Trust?

Parental mentalisation (PM) refers to parents' ability to reflect on and interpret their child’s internal experiences (Bateman & Fonagy, 2019). The three predominant models conceptualizing PM are mind-mindedness (Meins et al., 2001), insightfulness (Koren-Karie et al., 2002), and parental reflective functioning (Slade, 2005). In a previous study, we combined measures from these models to identify five core PM components: (1) Awareness, recognizing the child as an independent individual with unique thoughts; (2) Mind-Reading Confidence, the parent's confidence in accurately interpreting the child’s mental states; (3) Pre-Mentalising (PreM), an inability or refusal to explore the child's mind and a tendency to make negative attributions regarding their behavior; (4) Reflecting on Past-Now, parental insight into their own attachment history and its impact on the parent-child relationship; (5) Forbearance, the capacity to tolerate and understand the child's negative behaviors. PM has been proposed as a crucial component in parenting, particularly influencing epistemic trust and attachment trust. Epistemic trust refers to a child’s capacity to trust and learn from social communication (Fonagy et al., 2007). Prior research suggests that children who are less securely attached to a caregiver are also less likely to trust the information provided by them (Corriveau et al., 2009). Attachment trust, on the other hand, reflects a child’s belief in the caregiver’s availability and support during distress (Bowlby, 1969). Based on the Learning Theory of Attachment (Bosmans et al., 2020), secure attachment development can be considered as a trial-by-trial learning process that is comparable to safety conditioning. During safety conditioning, a parent (Conditional Stimulus; CS) who can provide the child with comfort and support (Unconditional Stimulus; UCS) when the child is distressed will activate in the child a rewarding sense of relief and comfort (Unconditional Response; UCR). After repeated learning experiences, the child starts associating the parent (CS) with a sense of relief and comfort (UCR) during distress, and the parent (CS) may then start to elicit the child’s secure attachment expectations and trust about parental availability and responsiveness during distressing events (Conditional Response; CR). Further, the LTA also suggests that the CS-UCS contingency (the probability that the CS is followed by the UCS) is important in whether the parent (CS) can become a safety cue: if the contingency is high (i.e., parent consistently offer help and support [UCSsupport] in distress), the parent (CS) will turn into a safety cue and elicit child’s secure attachment expectations and trust (CR). In contrast, if the contingency is low, it will lead to the development of insecure attachment expectations (Bosmans et al., 2020). We will manipulate PM components during a trial-by-trial attachment learning experiment to test the impact of each component on epistemic trust and attachment trust. In this study, we seek to manipulate three PM components (PreM, Confidence, and Forbearance) experimentally to examine their influence on both epistemic trust and attachment trust in children aged 4-5 years. We hypothesize that children will exhibit greater epistemic trust towards animated caregivers who embody PM components associated with secure attachment. To test this, we have designed a trial-by-trial epistemic trust learning experiment following a previously developed paradigm for middle childhood children (Bosmans et al., 2019), using dolls that enact different PM components (see Methods for details).