The impact of parental bonding and attachment style on different concepts of parental mentalization.

Parental mentalization refers to a parent’s capacity to envision his or her child as being motivated by internal mental states such as feelings, wishes, and desires, and to be able to reflect on his or her own internal mental experiences and how they are shaped and changed by interactions with the child. Given this capacity the parent is able to interact sensitively with his or her child, which is significant for the child to develop a secure attachment representation. It is theorized that the parent´s ability to mentalize, not only facilitates secure attachment, but is central for the child to develop adequate mental representations of reasons for behaviour, by its own, and following that, the capacity to mentalize. The impaired ability to mentalize is seen as important psychopathological factor in many mental disorders. Accordingly impaired parental mentalization can be assumed to play a central role in in the transgenerational transmission of mental disorders. Being a relatively young concept with a small but promising empirical base, further work is needed to understand parental mentalization. In comparing two concepts of the main research branches, namely mind-mindedness (MM) and parental reflective functioning (PRF), this paper and two other studies, building the author´s dissertation project, are aimed to investigate the complex nature of parental mentalization. The first of the studies focuses on how a mother´s attachment experiences influence parental mentalization. With attachment experiences indicating a social environment to build mental representations about reasons for behaviours of others, respectively her child, two different resources of such are investigated. As theoretical literature proposes the importance of early attachment experiences, they will be captured with the Parental Bonding Instrument, which pictures the extant of care and overprotection received from the parents. Further, taking a more constructivist perspective, attachment representations are able to change with attachment experiences beyond and after those with the own parents. Indicative of such attachment experiences is the Experience in Close Relationships Questionnaire, which pictures the attachment style in current close relationships. The first study´s main interest is to search out the impact of different attachment experiences on mother´s mentalization. The second study investigates the impact of mother´s symptoms of depression and anxiety on parental mentalization. Conflicting evidence regarding the impact of symptoms of depression on parental mentalization and barely evidence in regard to anxiety symptoms make further investigations necessary. In addition to that, this study tries to picture the relative impact of psychopathological symptoms in comparison to attachment representations. As attachment representations are theorized to be a relative stable influence on parental mentalization, and symptoms of psychopathology could be a more state like influence, a comparison will help to understand the concept of parental mentalization, and guide aims of interventions. To do so data from Study 1, especially the Parental Bonding Instrument and the Experience in Close Relationships Questionnaire, will be used as indicators of attachment representation. The third study takes consequences of impaired parental mentalization and mother´s psychopathology on the child´s empathy development in account. As empathy can be understood as a form of mentalization, the transgenerational mechanisms are also central in this study. In comparing the influence of mother´s mentalization and psychopathological symptoms on her child´s empathy, this study contributes important empirical data, to understand the emergence of risk factors for psychopathology. Study 1