TY  - INPR
ID  - discovery10192930
KW  - psychological well-being
KW  -  emotion regulation
KW  -  mentalizing
KW  -  resilience
KW  -  mental health
A1  - Schwarzer, Nicola-Hans
A1  - Heim, Nikolas
A1  - Gingelmaier, Stephan
A1  - Fonagy, Peter
A1  - Nolte, Tobias
UR  - https://doi.org/10.1177/00332941241261902
N2  - Background: In recent years, mentalizing ? the capacity to understand one?s own and others? intentional mental states in social contexts ? has been considered to be a protective capacity that enables adaptive processing of stress-related emotional arousal, benefits general well-being and underpins adaptive emotion regulation. /

Objective: Several studies using cross-sectional research designs have demonstrated the potential health-promoting effect of mentalizing in non-clinical samples. However, longitudinal evidence is scarce. The present study aimed to investigate whether mentalizing predicts well-being and emotion regulation strategies in a non-clinical sample of mainly young adults using a prospective longitudinal design. /

Methods: In a prospective research design, 135 participants completed questionnaires assessing well-being, psychological symptom severity and mentalizing capacity at baseline (T1). Twelve months later (T2), emotion regulation strategies (suppression and cognitive reappraisal), well-being and psychological symptom severity were assessed by self-report. The data were analyzed using multivariate linear regression analysis. /

Results: Impairments in mentalizing were a significant negative predictor of well-being 12 months later. Furthermore, impairments in mentalizing positively predicted suppression of emotional states at T2. No association was found between deficits in mentalizing and cognitive reappraisal of emotional states over the course of 1 year. /
 
Conclusion: The findings indicate that mentalizing is longitudinally associated with mental health indicators in a non-clinical adult sample. Specifically, ineffective mentalizing was associated with impaired psychological well-being and a tendency to suppress intense emotional states over a period of 1 year.  Future research should replicate these findings using multiple measurement timepoints to establish causality.
AV  - public
JF  - Psychological Reports
TI  - Mentalizing as a Predictor of Well-Being and Emotion Regulation: Longitudinal Evidence from a Community Sample of Young Adults
SN  - 0033-2941
Y1  - 2024/06/14/
PB  - Ammons Scientific
N1  - This version is the author accepted manuscript. For information on re-use, please refer to the publisher?s terms and conditions.
ER  -