Metaphor, Attachment and Mentalization: The Influence of Mothers' Use of Mental State Metaphors in Attachment Narratives on Children's Theory of Mind and Emotion Understanding

The mechanisms by which representations of attachment are inter- generationally transferred continue to be a focal point of research and theory. Possible explanations of closing this "transmission gap" have included caretakers' attunement to their children across behavioral, emotional and verbal channels. Research suggests that such attunement may involve not only sensitivity to the child's vital and emotional needs, but also the appreciation of the child's inner mental life, or mentalization. The present study builds on prior research from the fields of attachment, linguistics and cognitive psychology to examine the role of mental metaphors in the transmission of attachment representations and mentalization skills from mothers to children. Participants consisted of 76 British mother-child dyads from a longitudinal sample. Mothers' prenatal Adult Attachment Interviews (AAIs) were reliably coded for mental state metaphors, using an adapted metaphor identification process (Steen, et al., 2010). Outcome measures included mother-infant security of attachment at age one, children's theory of mind competence at age five and children's emotion recognition at age six. Results partially confirmed hypotheses. Small correlations were observed between the frequency of mothers' emotion metaphors and their mentalization capacity in prenatal AAIs. Furthermore, mothers' use of unconventional emotion metaphors correlated to a small degree with mother-infant attachment security and behaviors at age one, but were not independently predictive of these outcomes when including mothers' mentalization scores. Finally, frequency of unconventional emotion metaphors in mothers' AAIs independently predicted children's emotion understanding six years later, after accounting for children's age and language skills, mothers' overall emotion word frequency and mothers' mentalization scores. Results suggest that mothers' use of less conventional emotion verbal metaphors has a small independent influence on children's mentalization capacities. Implications for attachment research, as well as limitations are discussed.