Mind-Mindedness

Mind-Mindedness Within Interpersonal Relationships

Mind-mindedness emphasizes an individual’s tendency to consider the mental states of others within interpersonal relationships. There have been two main approaches to the measurement of mind-mindedness. The first examines the presence of internal or mental state language during observations of interpersonal interactions—for example, the language used while a mother plays with her child. These interpersonal interactions are filmed and subsequently transcribed, and standardized manuals have been developed to assess the mental state language content of these transcriptions. The second approach assesses mind-mindedness by asking individuals to provide open-ended narratives of those who are close to them, which might include a description of their spouse, sibling, or child. Again, these narratives are transcribed and assessed for their mental state language content following standardized procedures. Importantly, both the interactive and narrative measurements focus on descriptions and language of interpersonal relationships and seem to converge in their measurement of mind-mindedness across these relationships, indicating the reliability of these approaches.

Mind-mindedness remains stable over time, suggesting this critical capacity to social functioning may be somewhat trait-like. Importantly, even though mind-mindedness may reflect a trait, this capacity is likely to be specific to close, interpersonal relationships as evidenced by empirical research. To test the interpersonal relatedness of mind-mindedness, researchers have asked participants to describe different individuals whom they vary with in terms of their interpersonal connectedness. For instance, parents’ mind-mindedness when describing their child is correlated with their levels of mind-mindedness when describing their romantic partner—consistent with a trait-like attribute of mind-mindedness. For instance, a parent may describe their child using mental states words such as happy, thoughtful, and curious—with a similar frequency of mental state words being employed when this parent is asked to describe his or her spouse. Similarly, nonparents’ mind-mindedness is correlated when these participants were asked to describe their close friends as well as their romantic partners. However, when participants were asked to describe famous individuals (or pieces of artwork), there were no associations between their levels of mind-mindedness and their prior descriptions of their own interpersonal relationships. Taken together, these findings suggest that mind-mindedness may be a stable trait-like construct within interpersonal relationships (such as those with a loved one), but that mind-mindedness may not be a general capacity employed across all contexts.

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