GYÖRGY GERGELY
Developmental Cognitive Science Centre, Central European University, Budapest, Hungary

Attachment, mentalisation, and intersubjectivity: The development of the representational affective self.

Infant-directed parental mentalization (Fonagy et al., 2002; Meins, Fernyhough, Fradley, & Tuckey, 2001) and contingent affect-mirroring interactions (Gergely & Watson, 1996, 1999;) have long been thought to causally contribute to the development of the representational affective and introspective self (Gergely & Unoka, 2008) and to the internalization of affectregulative mentalizing strategies of emotional self-regulation and self-control. Earlier research tended to focus on the impact of maternal mind-mindedness on infant attachment security and later competence in passing theory of mind tasks in early childhood (Fonagy et al. 1997; Meins et al. 1998, 2003; Meins, Fernyhough, Wainwright, Das Gupta, Fradley, & Tuckey, 2002), but the causal linking mechanisms mediating these hypothesized developmental effects and underlying the (relatively weak and sometimes contradictory) correlational findings have not been sufficiently specified or demonstrated. Building on the new cognitive developmental theory of 'natural pedagogy' (Gergely & Csibra, 2006; Gergely & Unoka, 2008) the present research takes a different approach: it investigates the cognitive developmental effects of a specific factor of mind-minded parental affect-regulative interactions, namely, the 'markedness' of parental emotion-expressive referential communications on later representational competence in using pretend play as a mentalizing strategy for affective self-regulation. Here we report the results of a longitudinal study showing that a) a parental disposition to employ 'marked' forms of ostensive-referential communications during affect-regulative interactions at 12 months of age in the Mirror Interaction Task (Koos & Gergely, 2001) predicts higher level of representational competence in a battery of pretend play tasks at 3-4 years of age (Futo, Koos, & Gergely, in prep.), and b) that measures of maternal mind-mindedness and mentalizing soothing strategies together predict later ability to use elaborative pretend play as a mentalizing cognitive strategy to cope with experimentally induced affective conflict and stress. The implications of these results for models of the development of the representational affective self and the emergence of selfreflective mentalizing strategies of emotional self-control are discussed.

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