Maternal Attribution of Infant Mental States Based on the Quality of Early Multimodal Interactions

Abstract

Research on early attachment quality has been based almost exclusively on observational measurements of behavioral correlates of child care quality. It is crucial to draw on measures that also consider the representational aspects that mothers have of their children, (mind-mindedness construct [MM]). Objective: to find out if the quality of early dyadic multimodal interaction affects the attunement of the dyad measured by the mind-mindedness construct. Our hypothesis was that mothers who have a lower quality of interaction with their babies will demonstrate an impoverished mind-mindedness (MM) ability. Materials and methods: 5 minutes of 40 recordings of face-to-face interaction sessions of mother-baby dyads (3-6 months) were used. Each maternal vocalization was categorized as a MM or non-MM comment, and then the one categorized as MM comments was analyzed according to whether it was attuned (MMCa) or not (MMCna) to the child's behavior. In addition, the quality of the bond focused on dyadic visual, tactile and verbal dyadic interactions was analyzed. Results: it was observed that, when dyads showed inadequate multimodal interaction between the mother and her baby, the mother tends to make more mind-mindedness comments not in tune with the child's behavior and that the intergroup difference was significant [adequate=2.3 (3), inadequate=6.7 (5.0), W=242, p ≤ .02]. While no significant differences were observed for mindmindedness comments attuned to child behavior [adequate=4 (4.3), inadequate=6.5 (6), W=286.5, p ≤ .2]. likewise, the assessment of visual interaction shows significant differences between the amounts of MMCna based on early bond quality [adequate=3.5 (4.6), inadequate=8.3 (5.6), p ≤ .01], as well as verbal interaction among the members of the dyads [adequate=2.7 (3.6), inadequate=6.8 (5.8), p ≤ .02]. on the contrary, statistically significant differences were observed in the amount of MMCa in relation to the body interaction [adequate=2.4 (2.3), inadequate=6.7 (5.9), p ≤ .02]. Discussion and conclusions: it was observed that due to the impoverishment of the quality of early multimodal interaction, mothers make MM verbalizations that are not tuned to the child's behavior. this increase in MMCna due to the low quality of the early interactional bond may have repercussions on children's linguistic, cognitive and socio-emotional development. Therefore, psychotherapeutic intervention is essential from the beginning of the mother-baby bond in order to prevent the establishment of low-quality interactions and impoverishment of child development.