Intra‐Individual Differences and Relationship‐Specificity of Mentalising in Early Adolescence

Abstract

There is increasing interest in understanding how relationships promote children’s understanding of their own and others’ thoughts and feelings. A key question in this research is whether children’s ability and motivation to represent and nderstand anothers’ thoughts and feelings is a function of the quality of the relationship with that individual or, alternatively, a more general characteristic of the child that is similarly expressed across relationship contexts. The current study sought to extend previous research by assessing mentalising behaviour in early adolescence and examining intra‐individual differences in adolescents’ mentalising behaviour about self and other in different relationships. The research design exploited the natural experiment of the secondary school, in which children develop very diverse relationships with different teachers. In the spring of the academic year, a vignette‐based, semi‐structured interview was administered, and students’ understanding and attributions of mental states of their most and least liked teachers were coded using a newly developed system. Results indicated that there were significant intra‐individual differences in adolescents’ mentalising; the psychological sophistication with which adolescents understood and described another’s behaviour was predicted from the affective quality of the relationship. In addition, there was significantly less incongruity or distortion in adolescents’ mentalising about their most liked teacher compared with their least liked teacher, highlighting the need to consider not only the presence but also the ‘accuracy’ of mentalising.