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Imagining your child's mind: psychosocial adjustment and mothers' ability to predict their children's attributional response styles

Sharp, C; Fonagy, P; Goodyer, IM; (2006) Imagining your child's mind: psychosocial adjustment and mothers' ability to predict their children's attributional response styles. British Journal of Developmental Psychology , 24 197 - 214. 10.1348/026151005X82569. Green open access

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Abstract

One class of parent-child interaction that has recently received attention is maternal engagement with her child at a mental level. The current study operationalises this notion by asking the mothers of 354 7-11 year old children drawn from a larger community sample (n=659) to guess the responses of their children, who in turn, were asked to attribute thoughts to their peers in distressing peer-related scenarios. The following predictions were made: (1) mothers would be above chance in the accuracy by which they predicted their children’s overal attributional styles (2) increased maternal accuracy would be an important correlate of reduced psychopathology symptoms in children; and (3) poor maternal accuracy would associated with a maladaptive child attributional response style characterised by unrealistic and overly positive attributions. Results suggested that maternal accuracy was normally distributed with mothers accurately guessing the responses of their children for about half of the social scenarios. Mothers were furthermore shown to be above chance in the accuracy by which they predicted their children's overall attributional styles. Maternal accuracy was found to be related to child psychosocial adjustment (reduced scores on child psychopathology measures), whilst poor maternal accuracy was associated with ineffective social-cognitive reasoning, as indexed by an unrealistic and overly positive child attributional style. Findings are discussed within the context of the burgeoning literature linking attachment, family talk about feelings and thoughts and parental mind-mindedness.

Type: Article
Title: Imagining your child's mind: psychosocial adjustment and mothers' ability to predict their children's attributional response styles
Open access status: An open access version is available from UCL Discovery
DOI: 10.1348/026151005X82569
Publisher version: http://dx.doi.org/10.1348/026151005X82569
Additional information: This is the pre-peer reviewed version of the following article: Sharp, C; Fonagy, P; Goodyer, IM; (2006) Imagining your child's mind: psychosocial adjustment and mothers' ability to predict their children's attributional response styles. British Journal of Developmental Psychology , 24 197 - 214, which has been published in final form at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1348/026151005X82569
Keywords: Linguistic acquisitional style, manifest anxiety scale, difficulties questionnaire, attachment security, self-perceptions, positive view, dark side, strengths, risk, peer
UCL classification: UCL
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences > Div of Psychology and Lang Sciences
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences > Div of Psychology and Lang Sciences > Clinical, Edu and Hlth Psychology
URI: https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/133788
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