La relazione madre-bambino: mentalizzazione e comunicazione materne e competenze relazionali e rappresentazionali infantili

This study is based on the integration of the communicative approach to attachment (Bretherton, 1995), the intersubjective perspective of Infant Research (Sander, 1977) and mentalization theories (Fonagy et al., 1996; Meins, 2001). These frameworks hypothesize that children’s relational and representational competences develop in a complex matrix of communication. The aim was to investigate aspects of complex communicative processes (Brown et al. 1997). The study focused on the relationship between the following maternal characteristics: prosody, verbal communication (Carli & Nasuelli, 2003), mentalization as well as on the children’s attachment patterns and their levels of symbolic play, as precursors of mentalization. Method Participants: 96 non-clinical Italian mother-infant dyads, when children were 6, 12 and 18 months of age. Instruments: -the Tas-20 (Bagby et al., 1994) for the evaluation of alexithymia, -a system to code characteristics of maternal verbal communication (Carli & Nasuelli, 2001); -the PRAAT program (Boersma & Weenink, 2005) to investigate characteristics of maternal prosody ); -the Parent Development Interview (Slade et al., 2002), to analyze maternal reflective functioning; -videotaped free play sessions to analyze Mind-mindedness and to evaluate symbolic play development); -the Strange Situation (Ainsworth & Wittig, 1969): to evaluate children's attachment to mothers. Results and discussion As expected, Mother’s reflective functioning, as well as their prosody and verbal communication during the Strange Situation differed according to children’s security of attachment. No relations were found with symbolic play. Furthermore, mentalization measures were not related, prompting further studies on the concept itself and its operationalization