Caregivers’ Mind-mindedness in Family and Out-of-home Contexts: Methodological Perspectives

Caregivers’ Mind-mindedness in Family and Out-of-home Contexts: Methodological Perspectives Veronica Ornaghi 1 & Chiara Suttora 2 1 Department of Human Sciences for Education, University of Milano-Bicocca, Milan, Italy 2 Department of Psychology, University of Milano-Bicocca, Italy veronica.ornaghi1@unimib.it Chair: Veronica Ornaghi, Department of Human Sciences for Education, University of Milano-Bicocca, Milan, Italy Discussant: Dorit Aram, Department of School Counseling and Special Education Constantiner School of Education, Tel Aviv University, Israel Keywords: mind-mindedness, childcare, mental-state talk, interaction skills, emotion socialization Caregivers’ mind-mindedness (MM) has been shown to be a key predictor of children’s socio-cognitive, emotion and language development (Meins et al., 2003; Longobardi et al., 2017, Senhei et al., 2018). MM has been widely studied in the family context and less in out-of-home educational settings such as childcare centers (Degotardi & Sweller, 2012). It is usually measured through adults’ mental-state comments when talking to or about the children. The recent new lines of research request these traditional methodological procedures to be revised and adapted to other contexts. The aim of the symposium is to investigate MM both in the family and early childcare center through new methodological perspectives. Furthermore, the symposium contributes to advance our understanding of adults’ MM by investigating its unexplored associations with other psychological variables, such as beliefs, socialization styles, and interactive skills. The symposium consists of three contributions, one of which has been carried out in the family context while the other two have been conducted in early childcare centers. The first study longitudinally investigates the association between maternal MM and the emergence of mental-state language in 18-to-30 months old children. The second paper focuses on how and to what extent early childhood teachers’ MM relates to their beliefs about emotion and their emotion socialization, while also taking into account their age, level of education, teaching experience and training in emotion education. Finally, the third study investigates the relationship between caregivers’ MM and some structural quality factors (such as children’s group size, group type, and situation), as well as caregivers’ education, work experience, and interactive skills. This symposium will offer an occasion to focus on the new lines of research on MM and to discuss new methodological perspectives.